Once upon a time, I worked at a nuclear engineering consultancy. One engineer ate a hamburger and french fries over his keyboard, using it as a placemat, and never cleaned it up. In order to fix his computer, I first used a bottle of alcohol to clean the brown and black muck and hunks from the keycaps. It honestly smelled like a dumpster.

I would just toss that

It was his favorite keyboard. He would've cried, TBH.

Consider it was a place where one guy hoarded 15 years of WSJ in his office.

When staff are excellent professionals in the field, they get to do all sort of weird things.

Weekly Shounen Jump or Wall Street Journal?

This question comes to my mind as well everytime I see that abbreviation.

In that case whenever I need to do anything on his machine I would just bring my own keyboard. Regardless that’s gross and unsanitary, probably attracted all sorts of pests.

No lie my first job out of college expected you to eat at your desk and not leave for your lunch break.

An insurance company I did some work for had a bell go off for your two coffee breaks and lunchtime. You spent half of your lunchtime waiting for elevators.

Whaaaat? What year, country, and/or location was this? Call center?

I saw something similar in Tokyo. It was at a telco office. A bell would ring (at 1pm IIRC) and an entire skyscraper's worth of office workers would get up and try to get to street level. Every day.

I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).

That was the routine at Safeco in Seattle well into the 90s. My wife temped there over summers during grad school. Although she says they played Muzak instead of bells. So, in fact, it was much worse.

D: What slave-drivers.