Bathrooms and hand washing...

For those of you that know me, and know me well (this would be most people who have traveled with me to a race or 2 over the years), you know I tend to spend a lot of time in the bathroom. Call it an overactive bladder, or something of that nature. Graham once said I shit more than a seagull, and well, he may be right. But this is not about the actual act of defecation, it’s about the act that should take place after you do your duty, or after you complete your morning/afternoon sabbatical as I call it. Yes, the act of washing one’s hands when they are done doing their business in the bathrooms of the world.

As sure as the sun comes up in the East every single morning, I’ll be in the men’s restroom at work, doing what comes so naturally to me, and someone else will waltz into the bathroom. I don’t have a problem with this because hey, it’s a public facility. All are welcome to come and use it. Listening to the action that takes place outside of the stall I’ve locked myself into I hear a fellow co-worker of mine relieve themselves either in the urinal or the stall next door to where I currently sit. Now, what happens after they get done is that the hands should be washed, or at the very least rinsed off, but 9 times out of 10 I don’t hear the water running. I just hear the person zip up, and walk out of the bathroom, hands unwashed, urine staining their mitts, and of course subsequently the handle of the door. Several times in the past when I’ve been copping a squat, I’ve seen the person or persons who have perpetrated this act (you can see through the cracks of the stall), and when I’ve known the person who did this, I called them out on it from behind the stall door. As in, “Hey! Aren’t you going to wash your little piss hands before you leave the bathroom??” Normally the response I would get from such a question runs along the lines of, “Well I didn’t piss on my hands, so no I’m not going to.” Now these are allegedly semi-well educated (most have attended and finished college and have a bachelor’s degree of some variety) individuals that I work with, and they don’t wash their hands. I’m not some crazy obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) guy over here. I’m just looking for them to not spread their germs and bodily fluids around the public restroom. I think I probably picked up this quirk of hand washing from my grandfather, affectionately known as Gaggy. If there was one thing in life that this man was and still is adamant about, it’s washing your hands after using the bathroom, and not just washing, but scrubbing. So I’m sure that some of that OCD of his was not lost on me when I was growing up and being forced to wash my hands all of the time when at their house. After using the bathroom, after petting the dog (dog’s name was Pistol), after being outside, before going outside, and so on and so forth, but I digress, back to the bathroom here… It’s bad enough that the men’s room allegedly gets cleaned several times a day, but always seems to smell like an isolated corner in an alley somewhere, and now these guys are bringing their dirty mitts back out into the workplace. I don’t know where they’re placing their hands after they leave the restroom. On the copier maybe? Or possibly on the water fountain? I just don’t know really, and it kind of scares me. If I was a germ-a-phobe like my friend Colin, I’d never be able to work in this joint. Then there is the even stranger case of one person that I work with. Like clockwork, he’ll roll into the bathroom, wash his hands before going relieving himself, and then walk out. What? Why does he do that? Why wash before you go but not after? This is something I just don’t plainly understand. I think I need to buy stock in Purell around here and keep a vat of that stuff sitting at my desk, because soon, it’s not going to be enough for me to just wash my hands, I’m going to have to sanitize them as well. If only I could steam clean them after going into the great wasteland that is the men’s bathroom. I think it entirely possible that if I did that, the flesh would probably fall from the fingers and hands, so we’ll have to skip that step, and I’ll just have to roll with the hand washing instead. Oh, and of course, when I leave the bathroom, I have to use the paper towels I just dried my hands with to open the door with. I won’t use my bare hands to open the door, because of the mere fact that I know that 9 out of 10 guys who go into that bathroom to rid themselves of excess fluids stored in their bladder don’t wash after doing the deed. It’s just disgusting really, and there’s really no reason for it. I’m thinking about starting a “Wash your hands” campaign at work with the advisement and support of the company nurse. Either that or I’ll just send out a bunch of internet links for people to peruse about hand washing. Here are a few that I found about the subject matter at hand (OK, pun fully intended there, and yes, I know it wasn’t funny):

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/op/handwashing.htm
http://kidshealth.org/kid/talk/qa/wash_hands.html
http://eslkid.com/msgboard.mv?parm_func=showmsg+parm_msgnum=1001286
http://www.miracleseat.com/germs/

Let me go on about the alleged restroom cleaning that is supposed to take place in the bathroom that I most frequent in my workplace. Sure, there is someone in there replacing the paper towels, and wiping down the countertop with plain water, but does the place really get clean?? Not even close. Standing over the urinal in the bathroom, one is greeted with the unexpected smell over severely rancid human urine. Looking at the urinal itself, you see it’s white and shiny, and it has a urinal cake in it, so it can’t possibly be the bathroom receptacle. Then your gaze falls onto the floor. The black, dirty, and semi-sticky floor. This, is where the stank is coming from. There is an accumulation of, how shall we call it, missed deposits on the floor beside, underneath, and on the stall next to the urinal in the men’s room. It wreaks. You can’t even imagine the stench wafting from the floor in this location. Several times over the past years I’ve complained to the HR department about this, but I think since they’re all women, and they don’t frequent the men’s room, they probably think I’m embellishing the state of the floor underneath the urinal. Well, I’m not. I’ve smelled port-o-johns that were cleaner than this floor. It got to a point a short while ago that I couldn’t use the urinal anymore because it made my stomach turn when I had to stand over the piss stained floor. Finally, one day, I’d had enough, and I pulled the HR manager into the bathroom after I had been in it, and of course when I knew nobody else was in there and made her stand over the urinal. Her face turned about 14 shades of green, and I knew that she got the point of my complaints before. Believe it or not, this final straw worked for the most part, and now, when our cleaning crew cleans the bathroom (a thankless job I might add but one that is unfortunately necessary) they actually MOP the floor, whereas before, they just ignored it like it would go away and not be noticed. So for the last few months, things have been better in the men’s room at work. Much better. This is not to say that I still don’t scrub my paws and open the door with a paper towel, but at least the floor doesn’t feel like the sticky floor of the Rumford Cinema that used to be normally covered with all sorts of filth and interesting things (well, at least when the local movie theatre was still open in Rumford Maine circa 1988). At least now, I can go in there and not feel like I’m coming out more dirty than when I went into the place. Well, most of the time that is.