December 14, 2025 at 10:35 pm

Translator Turned IT Tech Investigated A Coworker’s “Broken” Keyboard, And One Look At The Enter Key Revealed A Banana Was Causing the All The Errors

by Heather Hall

Dirty keyboard that's covered with crumbs food or pencil shavings

Pexels/Reddit

Every now and then, a “serious” issue turns out to be pretty funny.

So, what would you do if a coworker came to you convinced their computer was having a real technical failure, only for you to walk over and see the actual cause sitting right on the keyboard?

Would you let them handle the rest? Or would you go ahead and fix it?

In the following story, one IT worker finds themselves in this scenario and chooses the latter to prove a point.

Here’s what happened.

Occam’s razor strikes again

I used to work as an in-house translator and was tasked with providing IT support on the side (it was a small outfit with no dedicated IT staff).

I had no problem with this, since I was pretty good with computers at the time, and the problems that arose were rarely anything really serious. I also enjoyed the feeling of control being an admin of a centralised LAN, but that’s another story.

So one day, a colleague came to me and said he kept getting a “keyboard error” when trying to start up. This colleague was a reasonably competent computer user, and the fact that he came to me meant that there had to be something actually wrong.

The problem was not what you would expect.

He’d tried the usual first steps — unplugging and replugging the keyboard, restarting the computer.

I decided to have a glance at the offending device before taking the trouble to rummage for a spare keyboard. I went to the shared workspace my colleague was in, took one look at his PC, and without saying a word…

…removed the banana that was resting on the Enter key.

Wow! You would think he’d have seen that.

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit have to say about banana on a keyboard.

No one said doctors were good with household tech.

Dirty Keyboard 3 Translator Turned IT Tech Investigated A Coworker’s “Broken” Keyboard, And One Look At The Enter Key Revealed A Banana Was Causing the All The Errors

Here’s someone who’s good with computers.

Dirty Keyboard 2 Translator Turned IT Tech Investigated A Coworker’s “Broken” Keyboard, And One Look At The Enter Key Revealed A Banana Was Causing the All The Errors

The story reminds this reader of another one.

Dirty Keyboard 1 Translator Turned IT Tech Investigated A Coworker’s “Broken” Keyboard, And One Look At The Enter Key Revealed A Banana Was Causing the All The Errors

According to this person, HP’s button placement makes them laugh.

Dirty Keyboard Translator Turned IT Tech Investigated A Coworker’s “Broken” Keyboard, And One Look At The Enter Key Revealed A Banana Was Causing the All The Errors

At least it was easy!

Silly things like this are much better than serious issues that take hours to diagnose and fix.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.