Another Good Reason Not To Shake Hands

Yesterday, I had one of those moments that always throws me for a loop. I'm in the restroom at work, I'm washing my hands, and I hear a flush. (Yes it's another bathroom post. What do you want from me? Nothing interesting happens when I'm sitting at my desk.) Dude walks out of a stall, looks at himself in the mirror, and tips out the door. He didn't so much as run his hands under the water. He just smiled at himself and then bailed.

Now I'm hardly a neat freak. I'm actually one of those people who believe that we over-encourage hand washing to a fault. I prefer that my kids go ahead and get a little dirty and pick up a few bugs, allowing their bodies to build defenses to those bugs. I sometimes fear that all of our antibacterial soap is doing is breaking down these defenses, allowing some new strain of bug to come along and bam, we've got a pandemic. Zombie apocalypses don't start from nothing, you know.

There are exceptions to this, though (the hand washing thing, not the zombies). Getting ready to prepare food? Wash your hands. Thinking about performing surgery? Wash your hands. Thinking about jamming a camera up my hind end to check for God knows what? Wash everything in the room. Twice. Probably give it a good once over afterward as well.

Well if you haven't figured it out yet, another exception is if you've just used the bathroom in any capacity, but especially if you were there to get some reading done. It's hard to express the horror I felt when I realized that the dude was just going to wander off. I had to resist the urge to cry out in alarm. For the life of me, I wanted to step out of the bathroom, point at him, and let fly with one of those screeches from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alerting everyone before the perpetrator touched a coffee pot or put his filthy hands into our kitchen utensils.



Of course, I could have just politely suggested that he wash his hands, but my way would have had a more long term effect, don't you think?