How many of you have been in a public bathroom, at work, at the gym, at the coffee shop, at the ball game, at school and noticed somebody using the toilet or urinal and completing their business and then zipping or pulling up and heading out without washing fitfully their hands? It is something that I have seen happening more and more these days and I am the type to notice such indescretions because when it comes to hygiene I am fanatical and I expect others to be so as well. Our culture involves disgusting practices for example, "the handshake," which in my opinion is one of the most wretched things I have to participate in to be accepted in this society. I am repulsed by having to shake hands with the fetid public.
Not long ago I was in a bathroom using the urinal, relieving myself of around two pots of coffee when I heard a guy using the stall letting it all go. By the tremendous passage of gas I assumed he was doing the #2. He had already been in the stall by the time I entered the bathroom and was finishing up as I was heading to the sink to ferociously wash my hands. This character finished his the #2 used only about one or two slices of toilet paper, flushed, exited the stall and exited the bathroom without washing his hands. I still feel nauseous thinking about it and you should also because maybe you were one of the people whose hand he shook at some point afterward on that day. How many hands do you shake in a week and how many of those people religiously wash their hands after using the bathroom? From my observations I can tell you that more people than you wish to believe do not practice sufficient hygiene.
It seems to me that the poor hygiene goes hand in hand with the rapid decline of society that we are all witnessing on a regular basis. The video game culture, over eating to the point of obesity, the high crime (as a child we used to leave our doors unlocked and go into the market leaving the keys in the car. Can't do that anymore), over use of medication, rapidly growing government, over regulation, you name it, everything has changed from thirty to fifty years ago and it's changed for the worse and that includes people refusing to maintain proper bathroom hygiene and therefore etiquette. It is all correlated and along with this decline it has become a habit of those responsible for this decline to never take account for their actions. There was a time when people admitted their wrongs and took responsibility but not any more.
And do you realize that many of these people have significant others at home. Do their spouses know that they conduct themselves like slovens? Of course they know! They are as beastly and disgusting as their counterparts and their kids then think it is OK to be a non-hand washing wiper and you have feces stains on door handles, chair arms, table surfaces, computer keyboards, the coffee pot handle, pens and rulers, books and files. Everything you touch during the day has at some point been touched by someone else. Now that you are thinking in the right direction maybe the next time you are in the bathroom, if you are one of those whom I speak of, you will think twice before leaving the bathroom without a proper foaming and rinsing.
There is a pizza place where one of the employees was one day making the pizzas that were ordered, including those called in over the phone, and he wore rubber gloves to keep his hands off the pizza. Very professional. He then rang up customers still wearing the rubber gloves and went back to making pizzas. Then at some point he went into the bathroom, took a substantial amount of time so you can imagine what he was doing, exited the bathroom wearing the rubber gloves and returned to the kitchen area and continued making pizzas, still wearing the same rubber gloves. This I'm afraid is a true story, and if you think something similar hasn't happened to you, you are as naive as I was until I worked in a food establishment in college and witnessed an employee spitting into a cup of someones cafe late and then covering the spit with foam. This was done because the customer had complained about something or other, I don't remember. I rambled on a bit and got off the subject but the point is that something has to be done about the pandemic of poor bathroom etiquette.
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