Make your hand washing experience a tad more emo, with some prime early 2000 Linkin Park tunes. — Wash Your Lyrics
With health agencies asking the public to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds to reduce the chance of spreading Covid-19, this website – called Wash Your Lyrics – will help you choose a suitable song rather than just plain old counting down the seconds.
Just key in the title of the song you’d like to use, as well as the artiste who sings it, and the site will convert it into a poster with lyrics matching the step-by-step hand washing instruction.
Its developer, UK-based William Gibson, 17, said the site uses Genius to find song lyrics, while the poster uses an open source template from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
Wash Your Lyrics: Day 1 Charts
— William (@neoncloth) March 10, 2020
1. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen (1063 downloads)
2. Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley (633 downloads)
3. All Star by Smash Mouth (633 downloads)
4. Africa by Toto (630 downloads)
The site appears to be quite heavily used, with Gibson tweeting that in one day, it has received two million server requests, 121,279 unique users and generated 89,527 posters.
A disclaimer states the site is not affiliated with the NHS’s Clean Your Hands campaign, any government body or Genius.
The site appears to riff off how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that people to “Hum the Happy Birthday song from beginning to end twice” as a timer when washing their hands.
A test of the service shows that it works with a variety of songs, though those with longer lyrics can throw it off, and cause users to wash their hands a little longer.
