At a former company, we were all issued YubiKey Nanos, which just never worked for me. None of my coworkers had a problem, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to register a touch no matter what I did, including swapping keys.
Eventually I came across a thread on an internal list for employees over forty, with several other people who were all having the same problem. The solution? Lick your finger. Gross, but it did the trick. And I’m stuck licking my finger every time I need to make a YubiKey work.
It's not a stereotype and it's not really a mystery.
Licking or wetting your fingers for this purpose has been a standard practice across the globe, when people are dealing with turning pages (e.g. for accounting), counting tickets, coupons, paper money, etc. It was never just something older people did (except in the sense that the practice is not as common now, as people in the US and Europe don't need to do it that much anymore, due to changes like reduced use of cash, etc.).
So, you might not have seen it since the need is mostly obsolete in most of the west, but it's still a thing elsewhere, and was very much a thing in the US and Europe too until a few decades back.
So much so, that there were office gadgets made for this, basically a base holding a small sponge, that you would add water to, and use it to wet your fingers for counting/changing pages. They're still very much sold:
I'm not stranger to licking my fingers when dealing with cash, or licking stamps and envelopes, etc. but the way some old people do it was always a little mystery to me. I'd see them taking a second or three to quite conspicuously stick their tongue out and slowly lick their finger every single time before turning a page or a banknote. I always figured it's just a force of habit, but they're doing it in maximum power-save mode, and are way past giving a fuck about how gross it looks to everyone around them. I never considered that maybe they really need to do it this way to keep their fingers moist.
(That realization scares me, as it means I too might become an obnoxious finger-licker in a few years.)
>I always figured it's just a force of habit, but they're doing it in maximum power-save mode, and are way past giving a fuck about how gross it looks to everyone around them.
That's the other thing about it, when it was being done in the past: people weren't so appealed by having bodies, or frightened of life and anything that's not sterile.
So they weren't as grossed out by everything - including a person merely licking their fingers to count some pages or notes...
There’s a whole little range of forgotten/dead products for this. It looks just like a tiny pot of Carmex or other lip balm and it coats your finger to make it that tiny bit more grippy to make handling loads of paper easier. No idea what it’s name is haven’t seen it in 20 years since I stopped having to hang around the church offices while my parents did choir practice.
Honestly, and in line with a reply upthread[0], fresh saliva may be more sanitary. I mean, it has some non-zero antimicrobial properties, plus it doesn't accumulate random stuff that could grow over time.
Yeah, I'm starting to understand why old people may be past the point of giving a damn about the optics.
The "sanitary" replacement is a wax, I always just knew it as sortkwik (? It's been a while), that you dip your fingers in. I'm sure it's still a thing for literal paper pushers to this day.
Sanitary in quotes since I'm not sure a pot of wax collecting stuff from your fingers for months or years is much better than licking.
Those sponges can be seen at every Japanese supermarket, to assist in opening tear-off plastic bags, because licking one's fingers is taboo. In a similar way, birthday cards need to be closed with tape rather than licked.
I think the idea is that you aren't putting your dirty fingers in your mouth, or your spit on stuff that other people might handle. The latter really doesn't matter scientifically I think, but the former probably does.
People put their fingers on all kinds of things other people have touched: doorknobs, elevator buttons, shopping basket/cart handles, etc. Adding a moist pad to that isn't going to change anything. Keeping people's hands out of their mouths, however, might.
I think COVID-times ended that habit quickly around my city. I used to lick my finger to open plastic bags on the supermarket and now try to find something wet instead - usually alcohol bottle.
(I'm asure it was always a bit nasty but when it became a deadly move, my habits finally changed...)
Source: when I was 5 I saw my grandmother, RIP, doing that and asked her about it. She explained that as she got older her fingers got drier, and now it's just easier to flip pages that way.
I'm a little bit envious. Reading such a great book for the first time.
I recommend re-reading it in a few years. Ecos books grow with you; the more you learn about the world and history, the more you'll find in nuance in that book. Maybe more true for me - as a teenager I've read it first as a mostly weird detective story. Later re-reads made me more interested in the weird parts.
There is, by the way, a separately published Postscript to the Name of the Rose with some notes on writing the book.
Off topic, a dog’s wet nose also works. Surprisingly useful on walks, e.g. when a poop bag won’t cooperate in a critical moment and licking your fingers is not an option.
That is a genuinely useful tip, considering the circumstances I've run into! Don't _really_ want to lick my fingers while dealing with dog poop, but the bags are a pain to open sometimes
I was shopping at a grocery store and a lady saw me visible distraught by not being able to open a clear bag and she told me to touch some of the produce I’m about to pick up or the moisture around them. Never had the problem again. Thank you, random lady!
One of our local grocery stores has a different brand of plastic bag, This one has a small adhesive spot between the layers near the opening of the bags. As you pull the bag off, the adhesive pulls the next bag open a little bit. Each bag is slightly open when you pull it off. It works surprisingly well.
I may try to suggest that the other grocery stores adopt this brand but they are big national chains and I doubt they would be interested.
for reference, this bag says
PULL-N-PAK®
Titan Supreme
28-2024-11-2
www.crownpoly.com
I've seen several different solutions to this problem over the decades, and they all have one thing in common: they quickly get value-engineered out of existence.
There's always a fraction of a cent to be saved by adding slightly less adhesive, using slightly cheaper plastic, replacing the perforating tool less often, etc.; couple iterations in, the solution stops working reliably. There's no back pressure, because it's not like anyone is choosing where they shop by whether the single-use plastic bags are easy to open.
Rubbing the opening side of the bag between your palms generates static and opens it too. Learned that from a meat department employee who saw me struggling one day.
I used to do that too. But now the plastic bags are gone and there is these paper bags with slightly offset edges att he opening. Really neat invention, why didn't we do that before? :-)
Yes this is very much the reason. It gets dry where I am in the winter, and it never occurred to me to do this. An older gent in a coffee shop once watched me try to turn a page, and enlightened me. I’ve met more than a few people who have a dedicated finger glove for turning pages :)
Wet sponges [0] for people counting money were a very common sight some decades ago before money counting machines and mostly electronic payments. Probably still being used just not so obvious anymore. Regardless of age fingertips will eventually get too dry as the paper absorbs all the moisture and flipping pages or separating banknotes becomes hard.
For touchscreens dry fingers are also called "zombie finger" [1]. The screen registers the too minute change in electrical field as noise and rejects the touch event. Some sweat (but not too much) on the fingers makes all the difference.
I'm also in a dry climate, and even as a teenager I often had to lick my fingers in order to get the plastic bags at the grocery store open (I was a bagger so had to do it all day). Eventually we got smart and started putting wet sponges by the bags, which is also an amazing life hack if you have trouble turning pages.
I'm unclear if this was intended to be sarcastic, but it's certainly possible for e-readers to be more accessible than books, at least for models that actually have physical buttons (and especially considering that e-readers can have zoomable text).
As far as I can tell, none of the current Kindle models have physical page turn buttons anymore, which is insane to me.
Turning the page is the main thing I do on an ebook, having a button on the side is so much more convenient than touching the screen, I don't obscure what I'm looking at, and I don't smudge the screen.
The BOOX Palma is an e-ink Android device (not a phone) that I run the Kindle app on. It has physical page buttons, and is better than any of the Kindle devices I've used. Also tunable ink speed and color temperature.
Maybe not accessible in the a11y sense, but definitely accessible in the "can read without DRM" sense. I'll take a book I can keep and read whenever and however I want to one that has to phone home and ask a giant corporation if it's ok.
Ah I'm 56, the touch screen on my phone has gotten finicky. I'll have to see if that would help in a pinch. I wouldn't want to rely on that all the time but under time pressure it is good to know about that.
I'm almost 40, some years ago I noticed that at winter I get more frustrated with my phones and start thinking of changing them.
It turned out each winter I make screens much more dirty and my fingers are drier. Touch gets more random, fingerprint readers success rate drops from 100% to more like 50%.
Nowadays I make sure I clean the screen with actual dedicated products often, and make sure I keep hands moisturized. It works well, even if the latter contributes to the former.
Haven't changed phone in over 2 years and still don't feel the need for change :)
i thought possibly bloodflow is less prevalent on the surface of your fingers in cold weather, and finger touches are harder to detect as a result, but i don't have data or proof.
You should really look at the S series by Samsung. I've been using Note devices since the Note 3, I would not give up the stylus for anything at this point.
You can also use some other part of your body that has moisture. My nose and my scalp are really oily, so I can rub my finger on my nose and then do the touch controls and fingerprint sensors and have it work
When my pixel 7 doesn't recognize my fingerprint, I press my thumb on the side of my nose to pick up a bit of skin oils and then my thumb print is recognized.
The Pixel 7 series has an optical sensor under the display. I wonder how some oil/cream/etc helps? The newer ones have ultrasonic sensors, so that should be better.
If your skin is dry enough it won’t make good contact with the screen so the “picture” will be bad. Adding a thin layer of oil basically acts as an optical transmission layer. Ultrasonic ones would probably have the same issue, honestly.
I'm not as old as everyone else here is mentioning, but started having this issue a few years ago with my phone. My fix was to rub my hands together for a few seconds. Don't know why but it's always worked for me.
You got it (mostly) right :-) Just one minor mistake: a native would write, "Would breathing on it be a contactless way..." in order to indicate that this is only one of several possibilities. You could also say, "Would breathing on it be the contactless way..." in order to indicate that this was the only possibility.
The rule here is really weird. The qualifier is only required when there is a singular noun being used as an object. "Breathing is way of doing it" sounds weird, but "Breathing and licking are ways of doing it" does not.
"English is super-weird" sounds right. "English is super-weird language" sound weird.
There exist artificial fingers to tap smartphones, sold in cold climates, so you don't need to take off gloves. Regular sausages in their packaging work great.
Interesting, it sounds like they should try to invent something that works in similar way to nerves on the skin as you can feel slightest touch regardless of moisture.
I remember one elevator button was a large metal bulge, that didn't get pushed, but instead did a little electric jolt to my finger (at a very small distance between finger and the button).
I used to have some woollen winter gloves with built in touch-screen fingertips. They worked well, but also made things quite slippery when holding a phone. This once resulted in a shattered screen when the phone slipped out of my gloved hand and flew onto a cold, hard, London pavement…
How cold does it get with you? I have tried all sorts of touch-screen gloves and they all stop working below -5 C. The cheap touch-pencils still work though so carry one of those around my neck if I need the phone outdoors.
I used to rub the side of my nose briefly to make fingerprint reader work on thinkpads, I think this coats the finger with enough oil to make it work reliably.
It works for my phone's fingerprint scanner. I used to have issues with it, and eventually thought it might be caused by the extra "safety glass" glued on top of the screen. Then one day, after another failed fingerprint unlock attempt, I noticed a text on the screen suggesting to moisten my finger. It must have been added in some system update, and I'm very thankful for that, or else I'd have to wait until this HN thread to figure this out.
I think it's just dry skin. When I worked in corporate IT we had the same issue with Yubikey 'not working' and almost all of those issues came from people working in an especially arid part of the country. "Lick your finger" fixed it every time.
Exactly, i do the same thing with my (new) Macbook Air, it makes the TouchID sensor work much more reliable (also, i use my middle finger by the way...)
Yeah, some touch buttons work through conductivity and are really sensitive. Fittingly for this post, our cloths dryer has a touch "screen" which is to say that it is a slab of plastic with icons that are touch sensitive. Often enough, I can't get them to register a touch unless I press really hard or if I wet my finger first.
uhh how to describe this... you can control how much saliva you push to the front of your mouth when you spit. The correct amount is next to nothing. Rubbing your thumb over your index finger spreads the moisture and provides feedback.
(I have to open countless garbage bags, licking is not an option)
User accounting the with the sibling system.lick the device to prove its your cake or you are thoroughly protected from being thoroughly grossed out by growing up with siblings .
