This handwashing lyrics generator is here to save you from singing Happy Birthday

By this point, everyone (hopefully) knows that you should be washing your hands for at least 20 seconds, or as long as it takes for you to sing “Happy Birthday” twice, to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases — including the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19. But now that we’re several months into the novel coronavirus outbreak, “Happy Birthday” is starting to get a little old (creative hacks aside). So here’s Wash Your Lyrics, a new tool that automatically pairs the lyrics to a song of your choice with instructions on how to wash your hands properly. The tool, which is the work of a UK-based developer who simply goes by the name William on Twitter, is simple but effective.

Just enter a song name and song title, and it automatically pulls the relevant lyrics from Genius and places them, line-by-line, over an infographic produced by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The tool is not perfect. Because it’s splitting up the songs on a line-by-line basis, some of the instructions can end up being far too long or far too short. There’s also the problem of gaps between lines.

In other words, don’t bother singing the beginning of “Basket Case” by Green Day unless you want to end up washing your hands for 40 seconds or more. Anyway, not to get all serious on you, but it really is worthwhile to learn how to wash your hands properly. If not for yourself, then do it for the more vulnerable people who might work in your office, live in your building, or panic-buy toilet paper in the same big-box retailers as you. Here’s the NHS’s official guidance on how to wash your hands properly, or you can just watch its official video below.