Don't Wash Your Coffee Mug In The Office Break Room

Everyone who works a desk job has “their coffee mug,” the one they use day in and day out to keep from taking a nap on top of a stack of spreadsheets. Sometimes it’s just a shitty logo mug that you got from your company during orientation and sometimes it’s a unique piece of ceramic art so show off your individuality. Mine was Four Barrel’s “Fuck it” mug, because fuck it, you know?

Whatever your mug is, science says you need to be taking it home to clean it regularly. According to an article in Lifehacker, not only is your office a cesspool of cronyism, it’s an actual cesspool.

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In the article, University of Arizona professor of environmental microbiology Charles Gerba, Ph.D. states that 90% of office coffee mugs are home to dangerous germs, with 20% of those containing fecal bacteria. And a quick scrub at the office won’t fix the problem:

Gerba suggests office cleaning methods are to blame. People tend to clean out coffee mugs with community sponges and scrub brushes that are laden with bacteria. So the process of cleaning them in the office kitchen or break room is actually making things worse.

That’s why Gerba suggests taking your mug home regularly and washing it in a dishwasher, where the water temperatures get hot enough to kill the bacteria and your nasty-ass coworkers can’t be spreading their fecals everywhere.

To summarize: take your poopy office mug home and clean it sometimes, because poop.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.