Don’t @ Me: Nice and Quiet Is How I Like It (Keyboards, That Is)

Loud Keyboards Are Horrible and Using Them Makes You a Bad Person

Photo illustration Elisa Barbier

Keyboards. Until we learn to communicate telepathically, they will continue to rule our lives with an iron fist.

Keyboards come in all shapes, sizes, and with all kinds of quirks.

That being said, a common mistake is the belief that all keyboards are created equal. This is very, very far from the truth.

While they are as diverse as they come, there are two overarching categories they fall into.

On one hand, you have the glorious, satisfying, and overall superior quiet keyboards, literal bundles of joy that are definitely part of the reason I decided to become a writer.

On the other side of this pointless debate are the monsters who like having their keyboards make noise.

Evil, silence-hating monsters that want to pollute every room with their infernal click-clack that can drive you to give up on everything and go live in a cave.

You might be asking yourself the same question I directed at myself before undertaking this task: Why? Why write about keyboards, when there are so many important issues that need attention?

There is a simple explanation. As journalists, we have a moral obligation to hold the powerful accountable, and to faithfully tell stories on behalf of the people who might not have a voice to tell it on their own. We also have a responsibility to call people on their shit.

With something as morally reprehensible as advocating for literal noise pollution of any office space, there is no greater public service than telling it like it is: loud keyboards are garbage and you should feel bad for using them.

In the sanctity of your own home, do as you please. If you want to give yourself a migraine, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But do not—under any circumstances—come into a public area with your typewriter-sounding-ass keyboard, bothering anyone without headphones.

When speaking to the quality of the keyboard, that point of view is a little more understandable. Mechanical keyboards feel like warm cookies, and I cannot overstate how amazing they are.

You have no excuse to bring that hell upon the modern world. It’s 2019, dammit. The world is going to shit anyways, so please just give us one thing that doesn’t make me want climate change to finish us off ASAP.

If I’m being perfectly candid, I had trouble writing this piece. Not because I couldn’t find reasons as to why quiet keyboards are infinitely better, but because I genuinely cannot put myself in the shoes of the kind of odd soul that actually enjoys hearing the click-clack of those infernal contraptions.

I cannot argue against a concept that is so ridiculous, that I literally cannot think of a single reason one would prefer that hellhole of a world.