The telephone sanitizer in
Douglas Adams's
HHGTTG book and radio series was provided as a
textbook example of a
useless occupation. The idea was that the
Golgafrinchans realized that a substantial portion of their population was
completely useless, and so they got rid of them by making up a story of impending planetary catastrophe and sending them ahead on a
space ark that was
supposedly the first of several. (This is similar to the trick that the
Tallest play on the useless
Irkan Invader,
Zim, in the first episode of
Invader Zim.) The joke turned out to be on the Golgafrinchans, however, when they were wiped out by a
plague contracted from a horribly
dirty telephone.
The telephone sanitizer was clearly meant to be a humorously-exaggerated example of sheer uselessness--perhaps the most useless occupation that Adams could possibly conceive--so as to depict the others with whom the telephone sanitizers shared the ship (advertising executives and hairstylists and lawyers and so forth) as being even more useless (and annoying) than their popular stereotypes. This being the case, it is strangely ironic to consider that Cornell scientists discovered in 1997 that many public surfaces--ATM keypads, computer lab keyboards, doorknobs, bus handholds, and, yes, public telephones--were contaminated with a whole host of virulent and nasty disease-causing microorganisms.
So, perhaps a telephone sanitizer might not be so useless after all.