HP to aliens: Be careful with our keyboards

If you happen to buy an HP PC you may find a slip of paper inside the keyboard box with a warning about the keyboard. You may think it’s the usual warning about carpal tunnel or something but no, it’s a warning about breaking the keyboard.

HP keyboard warning
Keep your dirty alien hands off our keyboards

The two handy tips, summarized:

  1. To prevent breakage, don’t bend the stand legs back until they break. Also, to avoid car accidents, don’t crash your car.
  2. Apply light pressure when using the keyboard. This implies that it’s possible to type with enough force to break the keyboard. Either these are very flimsy keyboards or HP imagines anyone using them will pound the keys like an angry villain with super strength*.

The best part, though, is the hands. Those splayed out appendages are like a Rorschach test. One glance and they look like pine air fresheners you’d hang on the rearview mirror, another glance and maybe they are tree trunks or deformed octopi or alien claws.

Since it is impossible to type without putting some kind of downward pressure on the keys, the illustration can be interpreted as telling you to not use the keyboard for typing. This would certainly keep it the legs from breaking. A good warning, then.

* based on my experience using keyboards in public–with many a broken leg, missing, stuck or wobbly keys–I think there may in fact be a lot of villains with super strength out there typing away

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