Thanks to my liberal arts education, I am a well rounded person. I’ve read some rather random books like those by Douglas Adams and Chuck Klosterman. This all leads to my tendency to be a collection bank for odd or useless facts. This week however, I came across one that is a little more interesting and a little less useless. Actually I found it to be down right alarming given the time I spend at my desk in a day. Also in consideration is time I spent recently out sick with the flu like so many other Americans on the East Coast.

Contrary to most germophobe’s beliefs and according to the New York Times Best Seller “Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You’d Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini“: “…Yes, Occasionally you can catch something from a toilet seat but this isn’t all that common…[according to one] microbiologist at the University of Arizona.” While I find that striking there’s some quite more impressive: “…the typical office desk harbors around four hundred times more disease-causing bacteria than the average toilet seat.”

Yes, that’s right! Your keyboard is so dirty that it’s filthier than a toilet seat. Gee, what a comforting thought in these cold winter months. So don’t touch my keyboard; it contains 511 germs per square centimeter. Please, I wouldn’t touch the mouse either with a lovely 260 germs per square centimeter. Oh and by the way that chic telephone on your desk has 3,894 germs per square centimeter! This confirms that you would be ill advised lick the conference room keyboard. Do you concur Doctor?

As a continuation of the post I created a couple days ago, I’d like to share this article with you written by the folks over at mint.com which reinforces some of the basic concepts I stated in my post. Like I said, protecting your online privacy is very important and should be taken seriously by newbies or veterans of the internet when you submit any information on the web.

From mint.com:

According to a recent report by the San Jose Mercury News, Sophos, a Boston-based Internet security company, was able to acquire highly personal information from 40% of the nearly 200 Facebook users who chose to add “Freddi Staur” as a friend in their Facebook accounts. Freddi Staur doesn’t exist, except as a toy on the desk of some Sophos employee. The company created a fictional person on Facebook to illustrate how vulnerable people can be when using social networks.

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