I tend to border on obsessive-compulsive. I wax the wheels on my car. I’m still not happy with the enormous performance gains I’ve gotten by tuning my WordPress setup to move from 4 to 400 (dynamic) pages per second.

So it stands to reason that how I clean my desk is… unique. The problem is that the desk is synthetic wood, so there exist a total of zero cleaning products that work on it. Using something like Windex cleans it but leaves it looking even more dull. And don’t even think about using a wood cleaner. I used Pledge once. It looked great, but it remained slippery for about a week. The Pledge is apparently supposed to sink into the wood. This is somewhat difficult when the desk isn’t made of wood, so you instead get an incredibly slick, oily desk.

I think I finally found the key, though: car wax. You clean with one of the many cleaners just to get junk off of it–I used Simple Green, but Windex would work just as well. And then you pour liquid car wax on and apply it with a cloth as if you were applying it to your car. Wait a while for it to dry, and wipe the white hazy stuff off. The result is a high sheen. It didn’t do as well as I’d like with filling in the scratches, but it looks much better overall.

I admit it: I’m a total dork. I just waxed my desk. But… It works.