Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

 

The sign in the restroom read, “Employees must wash hands.”

I waited 20 minutes, but no employee washed my hands.

When wild animals need to go, they just go. Civilized creatures, like nearly half the humans, need to find a bathroom. Some people carry their own toilet paper just in case they happen upon a restroom. That’s better than carrying a grudge. I’m thinking of carrying my own paper towels.

A woman walked up to my neighbor Crandall as he sat in a local cafe. She began to caress his beard.

“Do you work here?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “Is there a problem?”

She nodded and ran her fingers through his hair before saying, “There aren’t any towels in the restroom.”

I had surgery that made it difficult to pass a restroom. Every journey began with a trip to the bathroom. This caused me to develop a great appreciation of public restrooms. One of the saddest signs was one reading, “Restroom closed for cleaning. Servicio cerrado por limpieza.”

Portable toilets are good in a pinch, but rest areas rock. Other than loved ones, friends and home, there is nothing I’ve been happier to see than a rest area. I sometimes write columns in rest areas. You suspected that. I read about vandals damaging a public restroom. We can’t have anything nice. Why would anybody do that? Everybody has to go. Were they trying to make America irate again?

After resting in a restroom, I washed my hands with soap. I did so for hygienic reasons and to decrease the spread of disease, but mostly because my mother told me to.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends washing hands vigorously with soap and water for 15 to 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. An American Society for Microbiology sponsored study found about a third of Americans skipped washing and nearly 70 percent didn’t use soap. Women were more likely than men to wash. In a telephone survey, 92 percent of Americans claimed they washed their hands after using public restrooms. Michigan State University research found that the average bathroom user was below average and washed hands for only 6 seconds, and just 5 percent washed their hands for 15 seconds or longer. Half the men used soap and 15 percent didn’t wash their hands at all, compared with 78 percent of women using soap and 7 percent of women who didn’t wash their hands. Most people didn’t dry their hands adequately, and damp hands transmit 1,000 times more bacteria than dry hands.

I prefer the quiet of a paper or cloth towel over the rumble and roar of a hand dryer. Clinical testing revealed that cloth roll towels are the most hygienic for hand washing. High-speed air dryers, while environmentally friendly, aren’t as hygienic as claimed.

A clean section of a reusable cloth roll towel is dispensed for each use. I worked at a gas station that had one of the dispensers. The problem was that a new roll was installed only during leap years.

My experience has found paper towels to be a leading cause of plugged toilets. Warm air dryers can put more bacteria on hands than were washed off. They recirculate the bacterial laden air in a restroom, contaminating hands, arms, faces and clothing in the process. Most people don’t use them long enough to properly dry hands. And it’s hard to blow a nose or mop a brow with a hand dryer. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Jet dryers dry the hands faster than warm air dryers do. A user places hands in a narrow slot of an air dryer that uses high-speed air jets for drying. This spreads bacteria blown off improperly washed hands and can contaminate hands touching the sides of the slot. A study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology compared the dispersal of viruses when drying hands with paper towels, warm air dryers and jet dryers. Jet air dryers were the worst offenders.

I dried my hands by using a device labeled, “Using these energy-efficient hand dryers reduces paper towel consumption.” I dried my hands thoroughly before wiping them on my pants. I didn’t want to touch the germ-ridden door, so I opened it with my foot. I got my foot in the door and my body outside just in time to see my parked car get pooped on by a bird.

The bird didn’t need a towel. It had hands and it used a bird waterer as a bidet.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday.