Washing hands in public bathrooms

Here's something that drives me up the wall.

Go to your favorite mall, movie theatre, bar, wherever. When you're in the can, look around. More often than not, someone will finish taking a leak or a poop, and head straight for the door.

I mean really. If I wanted to touch these peoples' genitalia, I would ask them.

Support the hand-washing movement! Give this person a stink palm, tell their girlfriend or boyfriend how revolting their significant other's hygene is, do something!

Stand up for your right to not come into contact with leftover excrement!

My take on the situation:

No matter what you do, unless you go out of your way to avoid it, you WILL touch some dirty bathroom fixture before you leave.

People go to the washroom.. then, they turn on the taps with their dirty hands, wash them, and then touch the dirty taps again. They touch the lever on the paper towel dispenser with their dirty hands (unless it's a dryer, some of which have buttons to press), and then the handle of the door on the way out.

You can't win.

I like to make a game of it. Try as hard as I can to not touch anything, turn taps on and off with paper towels, have someone else touch them for me. Sometimes I even wash the taps! It's kind of fun, and you can involve others in your little game as well.

Hint: try opening the door with the sleeve of your jacket over your hand.

(as everyone to protect my secret identity)

Most urinals anymore, at least in my neck of the woods, are automatic. Thusly, the only thing that I touch when using the restroom (unless I have an accident) have been "secured", if you will, in sterile white cotton all day, since I showered this morning. So what's the point, hmmm?

Sarcasmo: amen!

Not to get overly technical here, or anything...

Those of you who don't wash, shame on you. I don't care what your balls have been encased in. Human flesh is where germs breed. Even if you shower every morning.

Those of you who use your sleeves for the door, what happens with the sleeve when you get outside? It lies against your wrist all day. You rub your face, hold a baby, and you've got all the icky germs taking a stroll.

The only solution I can see is to wash your hands in whichever method you choose, (with/without paper towel mitts) and then use the Purell stuff. The washing isn't redundant in that it will remove any invisible grime from your hands. Then the waterless hand sanitizer kills the germs you may have picked up on your way out.

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Truthfully, this node is virtually a direct quote from my sister, but she's not an Everythingian, and we share the same genes (the same jeans, too) so I don't think I've violated anyone's rights over here.

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Hear, Hear, Seqram!

The way I see it, even if you somehow believe that relieving yourself is somehow sufficiently hygienic that it doesn't require you to wash your hands in and of itself, the fact is that ordinary activities of everyday life do soil your hands, and you should probably wash them a few times a day even if you never saw the inside of The Smallest Room. So why not use bathroom-time as an excuse to get it done? I mean, you're already there, there's a sink all ready for you to use, and that way you'll get in a few hand-washings a day. Sort of like a biological alarm-clock, telling you it's time to wash your hands.

An old joke has two brothers coming home from college and teasing each other about their respective choices of university.

Guy comes out of the bathroom without washing his hands, and his brother notices.

"At Yale," his brother says, "they taught us to wash our hands after taking a piss."

"At Harvard," comes the reply which you are no doubt already saying to yourself because you've heard it a hundred times, "they taught us not to piss on our hands."

There's a doctor, a lawyer and a computer programmer all taking a pee in a public bathroom. They all finish at the same time, and step forward to the wash basins.

The doctor washes his hands, grabs somes paper towels, dries his hands and says to the either two "I use paper towels because hand driers can bred germs."

The lawyer washes his hands and places his hands under the drier and says "I use the drier because of it's precision and less waste."

The computer programmer looks at the other two, gos to the door, turns around and says "I don't piss on my hands".

Ok, my turn. Washing your hands is unnatural. Now I mean that, but I mean a lot of things. Hell, wearing shoes is unnatural. See my point? No? Let me elaborate:

If you can't trust your own genitalia to be clean, how can you trust the door handles, flushing handles, soap handles, paper towel handles, buttons, knobs, whatever? How can you trust that the zipper and button on your pants are clean? And the water (yes, I'm being excessive) How can you trust that anything is any cleaner than your genitalia? You can't. Don't bother.

In addition, post-toilet handwashing is paranoia on a grand scale. People are way too scared of the little things living on them. They're too scared of those things, despite the fact that you depend on those little things to survive. Oh sure, you don't depend on shit bacteria to survive, but you are naturally equipped with anti-shit bacteria bacteria. I promise. People haven't always washed their hands. Hell, a huge chunk of the world still doesn't use toilet paper (or water).

So I give you a choice. You can use the time, soap, water, and paper cleaning your hands every time you go to the bathroom to feed your paranoid urges, or you can just walk out and hope that some asshole hasn't left the door handle wet.