Do you have any cites for how common the dreaded PINWORMS (apologies for getting the word wrong, as you can see, I’m not too familiar with it) are? I’m geniunely curious. You act as if they’re as common as hayfever or something. Considering I’ve never once in my whopping 26 years heard of them, I somehow doubt it.
As for the rest of your post, like I said before, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree. You seem to equate failing to wash ones’ hands after using the restroom with being one of satan’s minions. I think it’s just a bit on the nasty side, but not worth getting your panties in a bunch about and freaking right-the-hell out, in general, about. (As much as you claim you’re not germaphobic, your posts indicate otherwise, at least as far as PINWORMS!! are concerned).
And if I walked out of a stall and didn’t wash my hands for whatever reason (no, I don’t generally do this) and you raised your eyebrows and asked me about it, I’d most likely look you up and down and say something along the lines of “funny, you don’t look like my mother…” and walk right past you. Even if I was just fixing my hose (which would most likely be the only reason I wouldn’t wash after leaving a stall), simply because I think the mommy thing is kind of obnoxious. When you’re not my mommy.
I’m funny like that.
Honestly, if you’re so freaked out about PINWORMS, keep a bottle of antibacterial gel on your desk. Wear a freaking surgical mask, or plastic gloves or something. Take care of your own hygiene and let other people take care of theirs.
I said in my first post that it is not common for everyone to get them. They are most common in households with small children, in rest homes, or in places where people have poor hygene.
I never got pinworms when I was a kid (perhaps because I was raised to always wash my hands) but according to the research I’ve done, they are not at all uncommon in the settings I’ve mentioned above. And they can be spread to others who have good hygene, as I mentioned above. So, it is not beyond the realm of possibility for a person with poor hygene who you work with to give them to you.
The reason I bring up PINWORMS is because that’s my experience. (And it was a doozy!) It woke me up. But to be honest, other cooties are far more of a real risk. The point is that these cooties are out there, and I hope I don’t need to drag out a multitude of cites to back it up. But perhaps a fewwouldn’thurt.
No, I did not, and I don’t think anyone else did either. But I think I made it really clear, it’s nasty. Look at the cites I listed: It’s NASTY. Is wiping snot on a kitchen counter nasty? Ya think so? Well, this is nasty too.
Maybe it’s a regional thing. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. I don’t know. But I do know that I’ve always considered it common knowledge that washing your hands after you go to the bathroom is common courtesy. Kind of like not littering. You just don’t do that. I think the cites I gave back my sentiments up.
I’m not. Trust me, if you saw my house, you’d have no doubt. Dust bunnies everywhere, always having to clean up cat barf . . . trust me. No one could live in this house and be a germophobe.
Maybe it’s just some of us who believe this, but it’s been just one of those things that was ingrained in me, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Sort of like it was ingrained in me to brush my teeth twice a day. I have pretty good teeth, by the way, but a coworker I know was always having trouble—losing teeth, having to get false teeth, and she wasn’t that much older than me. One day it came out how often she brushed her teeth—“every few days or so.” She thought that a relative of hers “brushed her teeth a lot—sometimes as much as ONCE A DAY!”
Okay, so perhaps some of y’all are like this coworker—she didn’t see what the big deal is about brushing her teeth every day. Just like you don’t see what is so appalling about not washing your hands after going to the bathroom. Okay. Whatever.
YIKES!
And I’d probably say, “That’s right. Because perhaps you were raised by wolves?” (It’s a JOKE! A JOKE!)
I’m not so much worried about PINWORMS now, because I am not in that workplace anymore. But yes, I do wash my hands a lot more now than I used to.
Look at the cites. That kind of thinking has helped spread SARS.
And yes, when I worked there, I was very careful. And it was exhausting. Because you never knew where the eggs might be. I always washed my hands before putting anything in my mouth, or touching my face (if I could remember). And my coworkers were the same way. One lady was especially careful—because she had contracted PINWORMS previously (found them squirming in her poop) and she didn’t want a repeat of that experience.
As far as asking someone if they’ve washed their hands…In days of yore, I had a food-service job, and a co-worker who was not my boss, but thought she was everyone’s boss. One day, I started my shift, and she immediately said, “Did you wash your hands? I didn’t see you wash your hands [emphasis mine].”
“Well, I did,” I responded truthfully. It kinda went downhill from there.
Also, for one semester (actually, less than a full semester) in college, I had a roommate who was a dance major. In November, I got the inevitable cold that always goes around college campuses, and she immediately freaked.
She couldn’t afford to get sick and miss classes. True, and I understood that. I had to be Very Careful, and wash my hands all the time, and not toss my used tissues all around. Fair enough, and I had every intention of cooperating. But in the following scenario, I thought she overreacted to something that didn’t call for a reaction at all.
I was sitting on my bed, she was sitting on hers. (The beds were at right angles to each other, with at least a yard of space between them.) I blew my nose and tossed the tissue it at the wastebasket which was right next to my bed. Seeing that it had bounced off the rim and onto the carpet, I reached down towards it, then froze at the sound of my roommate’s anguished half-gasp, half-squeal. Looking up, I saw her point at the tissue as if it were a black widow spider, her face ghastly white.
Gritting my teeth, I retrieved the tissue and dropped it into the wastebasket. As I resumed my former postion, I grumbled, “I didn’t throw it in your face, you know.” Which of course engendered a ten-minute discourse about germs and her schedule and the importance of her health and so on and so bloody forth…
Incidentally, it was shortly after this that she took to drinking cold medicine as a preventive measure, even though she had yet to contract any illness. One evening, I came in to see her lying on the bed with her eyes open, and asked if she was going, or had been, to dinner. She immediately leapt up and laced into me for “waking her up”. Sleeping with her eyes open? Riiiiiiiight.
I (briefly) dated a guy who slept with his eyes open. It does happen.
The college roommate sounds a bit overly paranoid, but your co-worker was doing the right thing, even if it is annoying coming from someone who’s not your boss.
If you say so. But did he take cold medicine when he wasn’t sick?
The college roommate sounds a bit overly paranoid, but your co-worker was doing the right thing, even if it is annoying coming from someone who’s not your boss.
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My point is, just because there’s a “right thing” to do, doesn’t make it okay for someone to appoint themselves as the Right-Thing-Doing Nazi.
Rilchiam, did you coworker friend not know whether or not you had washed your hands, (and therefore jumped on you and grilled you about it) or did she actually see you not wash your hands? I think there’s a distinction there.
I wouldn’t necessarily say something to someone about not washing their hands if I didn’t know whether they did or not and I’m just being paranoid—that’s a little over the top. But if I see someone come from a bathroom stall and head straight for the door without washing their hands, and especially if they are working around food, well, by damn, I’m going to say something. Because not only is that nasty, as one of the cites I gave above indicates, it’s really quite dangerous.
I think your coworker may have been overzealous (and she sounds like she may have been that way in things not relating to hand-washing), but handwashing in a food service job, as I’m sure you know, is not a trivial matter.
Ever since my kids came down with pinkeye, I learned about how regular handwashing and keeping your hands away from your mucous membranes in particular can help prevent the spread of contagious oogies. And I certainly don’t ever want to come down with PINWORMS.
But the office is the best place to pick up nasty germies, and I’ve found that the best favor I can do for myself is, even after I’ve washed my hands, use a paper towel to open the bathroom door(s) on the way out. That prevents me from picking up crapola from folks like Typhoid Mary.
My last office actually was full of really considerate people. We had Lysol in the bathroom (sometimes I’d almost gag on the fumes, actually, these women were NUTS with spraying it everywhere) and Clorox wipes for common surfaces like the receptionist’s telephone that was used by several other people every day covering for her on breaks.
I still think the biggest contributor to getting sick at work isn’t people like Typhoid Mary spreading germs, however: It’s job stress and the atmosphere you work in. I worked in a really sick office once (in every sense of the word) and have never seen so many people catch every germ that walked in the door in my life. Whereas I now work in a very high-volume, high-pressure workplace, but people seem remarkably healthy because everyone is enjoying what they do and the people they do it with. All the handwashing in the world won’t affect that.
I’m still curious about this refusing to shake hands upon introduction thing. Yes, I understand that one takes risks each time physical contact is made with a stranger, but considering all the oft-used surfaces I must touch in the course of a normal day, I’m not convinced this method of risk-reduction is worth the social offense it’s likely to cause.
We have two little 'uns in our house, one in cloth diapers, so we wash our hands pretty frequently, but I’d be more concerned about my mental health if the fear of contact with germs was causing me so much stress and trauma that I actually cut off hand-to-hand contact with others.
A partial list of some of the public stuff I touched yesterday:
touch pad of a gasoline pump
gasoline pump handle
cardboard coffe cup
paper napkin (someone has to stock this stuff, and it’s likely they touch them when they do)
coffee pot handle
plastic creamer container
lid
credit card touch pad
pen
paper reciept
Okay, that covers about 7 minutes. How is it possible that I survive the day?
You wanna hear something really gross? I touched a quarter yesterday. Yep. Dug it out of the bottom of my backpack and shoved it into a parking meter without even washing. Then – and this is the really gross part – I twisted the knob thingy on the meter and walked away without sanitizing!
and because no post in this thread would be complete without it: PINWORMS!
Actually, he probably did. Bit of a walking pharmacy that one. Hence the “briefly” qualification in my previous post
In most cases I’d agree with you but I don’t think food service workers can be too careful. Personally I’d rather that everyone who handles my food have an attitude like hers.
How’d we get to food service workers? I thought you worked in an office. And if you agree with Rilchiam in most cases, how come you’re putting up such a fight in this case (meaning an office situtation)?
The point Rilchiam is making (that just because something is the right thing to do doesn’t make it okay for someone to appoint themself Right-Thing-Doing-Nazi) is the same one I’ve been trying to make throughout this thread, to you and Yosemite.
Are you now agreeing with me or have you been misunderstanding what I’ve been posting?
Sometimes being a “Right Thing Doing Nazi” can not be so terrible—like with handwashing and food service. Or when it comes to spreading disease.
Seriously, if you saw someone smearing snot on a counter at your workplace, wouldn’t you say something? Or not blame someone else for saying something? If you were raised to believe something was super-gross (and had further formal education backing up the notion, and could provide plenty of cites), wouldn’t you speak up if you saw someone doing it? Smearing snot on a counter certainly deserves a comment, and as far as a lot of us are concerned, not washing after going pee or shit is right up there with snot-smearing.
The cites I provided back up the notion that handwashing is very important. It also backs up the notion that most people are aware that they are supposed to wash and they are embarrassed to admit that they don’t. Because, presumably, they know that not doing so is nasty. They already know better.
Letting people get away with nasty things (out of some sense of politeness or perhaps cowardace) just makes it easier for more people to believe it’s they can get away with it too—that it isn’t that important. I think a little embarrassment is good for such people. Like, if they were to litter (throw their cigarette butts on the ground, for instance), I see nothing wrong with asking them about it. Maybe if more of us embarrassed people who casually throw litter on the ground, less people would do it. Same here.
I’m not talking about being a self-appointed Proper Behavior Nazi at all times—all earnest and humor-impaired. But when you see someone doing something gross and nasty as if it is perfectly normal, just say something! Nasty people rely on the rest of us to be too chickenshit to say something. Shock them out of that delusion. Make it less comfortable for them to be nasty. And when I say nasty here, I’m not talking about gross private stuff that’s no one else’s business, I’m talking about inconsiderate, nasty stuff that affects us all (as littering and spreading disease do).
Well, I didn’t smear snot onto the counter. I had washed my hands, but there was a rolling cabinet blocking my coworker’s view of the sink, so to her, my hands were dirty because she hadn’t seen me wash. Now, if she’d seen me come swinging into the grill area and bypass the sink without a care in the world, that’d be one thing, but what she seemed to be interested in was my washing my hands because she’d made me do it.
So, what, exactly, do PINWORMS do to you? I assume they don’t kill you if lots of kids get them (and make it to adult hood).
Do they eat holes in your intestines? Do they work their way into your brain and take over control of your body? Do they write bad cheques on your account?
Not that they sound like a fun thing to have, and I am a compulsive hand-washer anyway, and when I hear someone take a crap and they not wash I do avoid them and sharing food with them, BUT, are pinworms gonna, ya know, KILL YOU?!?!?
I agree, TwistofFate. Some of the posters here sound like they have the brand of obsessive-compulsive disorder with the obsessive hand washing and such. It seems a bit irrational to me. I am not the germophobe that some of the posters here are, and yet I hardly ever get sick, basically one cold a year on average, and that’s it. How on earth have I managed to stay alive lo these 28 years without washing my hands 20 times a day?!? I mean, I must have missed the news of the epidemic of people getting terribly sick from shaking hands. Surely if this was such a danger, I would be sick more often, because I shake hands all the time.
On the same note, and as was mentioned in Cecil’s column on the subject, what about oral sex? I have been giving/getting oral sex for all of my adult life and have never gotten sick. Neither have any of my partners. And, no, I don’t run to wash beforehand or afterwards…I’m too busy gettin’ my freak on…and I have managed to stay healthy. Heck, when I go camping or backpacking for days at a time or even a week, and can’t wash, I live through that without getting sick. And keep in mind I am out in the woods and my hands are filthy!
A question for the germophobes: do you ever have sex? Ever kiss your significant other? Ever hold hands? Ever touch or caress your love one on or near their private parts?
I gave several cites about PINWORMS. Did you read them? They won’t kill you, but they’re nasty and no one who has witnessed them wants to get them or takes the precautions against catching them lightly.
I have also made it clear that I am not a germophobe. I don’t wash my hands after shaking hands with someone, I don’t freak out after shaking hands with someone, and I don’t avoid touching other people or shaking their hands. I also live in a house full of dust bunnies and cats. In fact, the job I had has given me a strong stomach and has made me a lot less squeamish. I cleaned up people’s barf and shit. I wiped butts and have witnessed all manner of unsanitary things—unsanitary things that might make a lot of you shudder. And I dealt with it. But I also washed my hands.
I just think that some things are nasty. Smearing snot on a counter is nasty. If I see someone smearing snot on a counter, I’ll say something. If I see someone dropping a dirty diaper on the ground, I’ll say something. (I wish I had been around to witness that jerk who dropped the dirty diaper at the shore of Yosemite’s Mirror Lake which I witnessed a few years ago, because I certainly would have said something.) If I see someone never washing their hands after going to the bathroom, then yes, I see nothing wrong with saying something. I think we’ve all put up with this sort of inconsiderate nastiness for too long. I don’t see any reason to be too gutless and chickenshit about speaking up. (And once again, I’m not talking about screeching, “UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!” I’m talking more along the lines of raised eyebrows and, “Aren’t you going to wash your hands?”)
I am curious—why is it that no one has addressed the scenario of witnessing someone smearing snot on a counter. Would you say something if you saw someone doing this? If not, why not?
I thought this thread was about hand-washing…where does smearing snot on a counter come in?
Besides, even if someone did do that, which, yes it would be gross, but would it be a Public Health Emergency? I think not. There was actually a thread here a while back about a study on how eating your snot was actually good for you, because the more germs you are exposed to, the more immunities you build up.
I just want to know, yosemite, what are you so afraid of? If you’re a poor housekeeper, why are you so obsessed with the cleanliness of your hands? If you live in a dirty house, no amount of hand washing is going to keep the germs off of you. The coliform bacteria is already all over you anyway, and as Cecil says, you can’t wash it all off. It’s on your body, in your body…
Are you really so disgusted by your private parts that you must religiously scrub up after you pee? I keep my privates very very clean, so my hand is not going to become germ infested if I tinkle. Besides, as Cecil said, pee is sterile. And I am not actually touching myself during the act. And, I am still alive and healthy, so what gives? If “down there” is soooo ucky then I can’t imagine how you ever masturbate. You probably wear a hazmat suit and rubber gloves
(It’s a JOKE! A JOKE!)
