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July 7, 2003 Is it me or has anyone else out there noticed that there seem to be more and more germaphobes around? When I say germaphobes, I mean those people who are so fanatical about personal cleanliness that they take a fear of dirt, germs and disease into the “few fries short of a happy meal” category. Now I consider myself a clean person. I take a shower everyday. I make sure that I don’t stink, which is more than I can say for some people, and I wash my hands after going to the bathroom or doing some other unsavory task. The way I see it is if I look well-groomed and my body odor doesn’t offend anybody, then I’m cool. The people that I’m talking about take this several steps further. They’re always, spraying Lysol or some other disinfectant around, dousing their hands with hand sanitizer, and running to the nearest sink to scrub like a surgeon anytime they have to touch something that somebody else has touched, like the phone or a door knob, or a computer keyboard. I know one lady who washes up in the break room where she works rather than at the sink in the bathroom because she thinks that the sink has germs. This in turn upsets another germaphobe who works with her, because she thinks the first lady’s leaving germs on the bathroom doorknob. And God forbid if one of these people has to shake hands. A lot of times these germaphobes will wait until the shaker has moved along and they think that no one’s looking and they’ll run to the bathroom or whip out a bottle of hand sanitizer or a antiseptic wipe like Sharona is always handing Adrian on the T.V. show “Monk.” That’s sort of a running joke on that show, but they don’t know how close to the truth they’ve got it. The way I see it, in a world with fewer and fewer nice people, when somebody wants to be cordial and offers me his hand, I’ll take it; and, unless there’s something on it when I pull it away or it has some sort of disgusting funk lingering about it, then I’m not going to worry about picking up ebola or the flesh-eating virus. Robert D. Raiford, the curmudgeon-at-large on the “John Boy and Billy Big Show” has had whole commentaries against the practice of shaking hands. First off he says that the practice is archaic: That it started in the old days when a man would present his hand to show that it was empty, that he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Raiford claims that there’s no need to do this anymore; to that I say it’s obvious that there are some neighborhoods in this country that Mr. Raiford hasn’t been through. He also goes back to the cleanliness issue and claims that he has worn a latex glove on his shaking hand to autograph sessions. Maybe he would prefer that, rather than shaking hands, everybody should just step up and extend their middle fingers, maybe moon him. Does that sound sanitary? The only germaphobe that I was ever in contact with prior to the last couple of years was a roommate of a friend of my roommate in college. Does that make sense? This guy would get up every morning and trudge on down to the shower in his underwear with his towel and wash cloth hanging on a clothes hanger and his soap in one of those plastic travel boxes. He would come back about an hour later dripping wet because he wouldn’t dry off in the bathroom. He’d be holding the towel around him and his soap in the box in one hand with his washcloth and underwear hanging on the hook of the clothes hanger. In his room he would inevitably have to touch either his washcloth or his underwear to put them in the hamper, which meant that he would have to turn right back around and wash his hands not a minute after getting out of the shower.
It seems to me that this whole
germaphobic trend is evidence of two disturbing
aspects of living in our modern society. First,
it seems that every other person is suffering
from some sort of mental quirk, if not an out-
and-out disease. Second, as a society we’re
growing more and more distant from each other.
We don’t want to shake each others hands, we
don’t want to talk to one another and it’s even
getting hard to catch somebody on the phone
without being caller I.D.’d, leaving a message
and waiting for the person to call back. Pretty
soon we’ll never leave our houses. We’ll buy our
movies on pay-per-view; we’ll shop for
everything else online. We’ll date and even get
married on online, and then there’s always
cybersex. Maybe the germaphobes will like this;
it does seem awfully sterile, but I don’t like
it at all. I like good, old-fashioned human
contact. So if you get to meet me one day, go
ahead and shake my hand. I promise it’ll be
clean and I’ll just take for granted that yours
is too.
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