Consider this: the girl working at your local fast food place with those fancy painted fingernails that extend out a good 1.5 inches from their fingertips? How do they wipe their ass in the bathroom?
They use the Scrape method. 
I’m another who doesn’t see a problem with people clipping their nails in public or in the workplace, as long as the nail clippings fall into a trashcan. I don’t understand the revulsion.
Fingernails are made of chitin, so next time just pretend the man standing at the end of the grocery aisle is whittling on an octopus beak.
What the hell did the plant ever do to you?
The clik of the clippers is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Even at home, I have to leave the room when my wife is doing it.
Add me to the list of people who aren’t particularly freaked by the dirtiness of nail clippings, but by the sound of the clipping. I can barely tolerate clipping my own nails, and I hate hearing anyone else doing it. You know what else really bothers me? The fingernails in this picture. It gives me a chill just looking at them.
pbbth, your story made me make a horrified face and shudder a little bit. So wrong, on so many levels.
Organic material (Keratin). There is a very large Ficus next to my couch and I regularly deposit hair and nail clippings into the soil.
Think THAT’S bad?
Check out this.
Or worse.
His hands are permanently disfigured because of the weight of these nails.
shudder
Nasty. But couldn’t possibly be worst than the time I saw this “lady” open a pack of cotton-balls, swipe her dingleberries, put them pack in the pack and seal them.
Good thing I wasn’t shopping for cotton-balls that day…
A question for those who have clipped their nails…well, anywhere but their bedroom or bathroom at home: why? It takes, like, thirty seconds to a minute to cut your nails. Are you that busy that you can’t find time to do it at home? Do you somehow forget to do it until your nails are annoyingly long, yet you carry a nail clippers around with you just in case? Why in the world would you do it anywhere outside your home?
Seriously, I don’t get it. That’s like not showering at home but instead stripping down to your undies and giving yourself a sponge bath in front of the sink in the bathroom at work. It may or may not be disgusting and unhygienic, but it’s definitely inappropriate and unnecessary.
My own father doesn’t get why we were disgusted when he took his dentures out and cleaned a piece of food out of them-during supper. He stalked off, all offended. gag
Like I said, it’s mostly if I break one. BUT AGAIN, I only do it in the bathroom stall. Over the toilet. That’s all.
Now, as for gross experiences, I once observed a man reach down the back of his pants and scratch his ass-during Mass. Gah. I’m so glad I wasn’t sitting near him, so I didn’t have to worry about the Sign of Peace. Gah.
Oh, and if I see ONE more teenager spitting on the sidewalk while waiting for the bus, I’m going to make them lick it up.
[confession]
I use the cellophane from my half empty cigarette pack to floss with when in a restaurant. Often, whenever possible, I’ll put the cellophane back on the pack and slip it back into my pocket for later use. If someone wants to bum a smoke I’ll just hand them the pack.
But clipping one’s finger nails in public is just nasty.
[/confession]
I confess I clip them at the subway station, and I let the clippings fall onto the track. I stand away from people though. Somehow I doubt my fingernails are any dirtier than anything else in the subway sauce.
Ninjachick, you forget til the last minute when you are running out the door.
Mere quibbles, trifles and poppycock my friends. Nothing to get all atwitter about. C’mon outside folks, out to the great outdoors, to the National Parks, in fact. I spend a lot of time in the National Parks, in particular, the desert ones. The vegetation is sparse, so any trash or litter really sticks out. Being an environmentalist, Samaritan and general good guy, I try to pick up whatever I find. It’s WHAT I find that is the problem. Probably 80% of what I find has been in an orifice: asswipe, tampons, smokes diapers. WTF? Almost every time, there’s additional evidence that they were ‘prepared’ to go through whatever the item was. There’s the diaper and the little tapes of the new one, there’s the tampon and the new applicator etc. So you planned on going through the product and also planned to leave you colostomy bag behind for someone else to deal with? CHRIST ON CRACKERS! You mean to tell me that you journeyed to a special, magical, soul inspiring place that would make a hardened criminal weep and you sat down on a rock and changed your fucking tampon? I once found a single, continuous piece of toilet paper (all soiled) 21 YARDS long. I dare anyone to try to equal this scatological masterpiece.
If I ever catch one of you fuckers red handed, it will be your organs out in the sand blackening in the noonday sun.
This seems well over the top to me.
Last time I checked, it was quite normal to grasp the extended hand of near strangers with your own and shake. In doing this, chances are fair that you’ll come in contact with several of those dirty, disgusting fingernails. Yet society seems unaccountably to endorse this practice - indeed almost to require it in some circumstances.
And can you genuinely believe that fingernail shards on the floor are a meaningful sanitation problem? In a place frequented by people’s shoes, some of which have recently trod the floor of a restroom, or stepped in dogpoop outdoors?
Clipping nails in public is certainly gauche, but to portray it as dirty and unhealthy is a serious stretch.
Well, we all have our irrational hang-ups, don’t we? And if mine happens to be a fear of other people’s scuz-encrusted nail shards flicking into the open salad bar at the grocery or into my slurpie, so be it. How is this different than trimming your hair at the grocery? I don’t care if it’s the cleanest hair in the world. It’s still GAG!
My main grievances are, that this is occurring around food and I that don’t know this person or their fingernails. I’m sure I don’t worry so much about my own fingernails. And if I shake someone’s hand, I can very well go wash my own before putting it in my mouth. Furthermore, hand-shaking is an invited action. If dirty-handed people started grabbing my hands randomly at the grocery store, I’d be grossed out then, too–and I’d start wearing gloves in public.
When I was in junior high and high school, one of our regular substitute teachers (he always wore the same hairy green sport jacket and red tie and was old enough to have subbed for Jesus) used to always clip his nails during tests. The room would be silent, all of us bent over our desks, and suddenly you’d hear [sub]clip clip clip[/sub].
And of course it only takes one teenager giggling to get the whole class started, and then he’d get all mad and yell at us. Finally we’d settle down and start concentrating on our test again, and a few minutes later…
[sub]clipclipclipclip[/sub]
I find it more tacky than gross. Although people clipping their nails anywhere near where I’m eating make my inner Viking start looking around for an axe.
I’d say they’re about the same: weird and socially inappropriate, with a decidedly low potential for any real harm.
Hair sheds routinely - in the supermarket and elsewhere. Despite precautions, it’s not incredibly rare to encounter one in food. It’s unappealing, but unlikely to cause more than an aesthetic problem.
What if? As a grocery store worker of 9+ years, I can tell you that all of this and more has happened in my stores and probably yours too.
Except the shaving. Unless you mean like face or legs, cause I have seen that.
Personal disgusting grocery incidents:[ul][li]The time I found a used tampon on the floor in produce. That is a toss-up with the time I found that someone had taken hers out and used it like a magic marker in the bathroom.[/li][li]The time I found a trail of human shit coming in the front door, around through the greeting cards, and into the bathroom.[/li][li]The time I found a pack of raw chicken that had been opened and had leaked all over the bags of rice it had been hidden behind – this is only notable because it had been opened. We find all sorts of products hidden in places all around the store, and if it had ever once been refrigerated or heated, we have to throw it away.[/li][li]The many, many times I have caught people sampling various items in the bulk bins and produce departments. When I see someone stick their hand into something that is consumed as-is and can’t be washed (like candy), I have to take the whole bin and throw it away. But we don’t always see them doing it, this I know.[/ul][/li]
Any disgusting action you can think of (and ones you haven’t thought of as well) has happened in your store. In addition, we find the condoms, the maxis, the diapers, the tissues, the used baby bottles, the stuffed animals we sell and have been shoved into some child’s mouth and then left wherever, the q-tips, and other assorted extremely personal items that have been scattered around the store by disgusting animals masquerading as responsible adults. Nail clippings and hair don’t even register, because they don’t really matter.
I don’t know why the nail-clipping bothers you – it’s not like you’re rubbing the food you buy all over the floor before you take it home. Besides, it’s all in boxes, cans, or bags, and it’s been touched by many, many people between the point it entered the supply chain and the time you buy it; I can tell you that our employees frequently wash their hands, but I doubt very highly that everyone along the way has. If it’s not packaged, you’d better wash it anyway – you don’t shove produce in your mouth without a rinse, do you?
People turn into monsters when they’re shopping – probably because they know that it doesn’t matter where they put this shit, cause someone else will have to clean it up.