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Ten Signs You’re a Germaphobe
1. You get why Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper wears “bus pants,” and wish you had thought of it yourself.
2. You stroke your cat with the back of your hand.
3. Your hands get washed, like, ten times when you’re switching between cooking and cleaning up the kitchen.
4. While watching a YouTube personality rave about the Bangkok street food samples, you’re confident you couldn’t take a bite without bringing along a local friend “in the know” about certain carts to avoid.
5. Observing your cat walk around messing with your belongings and jumping on counters, you can’t help but think: litter paws.
6. Pumping gas requires hand sanitizing wipes before you touch your steering wheel, bank card, and other stuff.
7. If you drop a tomato on the floor or in the kitchen sink, you wash it with a lil soap and water before eating or serving it (see #5).
8. The rule when sharing a drink with your kid: one gets the straw and one gets to open the lid and sip out of the cup.
9. You grip public door handles in awkward places–the top or bottom–to avoid the grasp of the masses.
10. You hold your breath if someone coughs or sneezes near you in the supermarket.
Published in Humor
I grew up on a hog farm.
I don’t understand any of this.
I’d be afraid of missing out on some of the good germs, or killing them, even.
9. is maybe the only one I might try. Sometimes I try to guess whether to grab the men’s room door handle at the top or bottom when exiting. But if it’s a knob, I usually just shrug and then wipe my hand on my pants.
I like Germans.
Gesundheit.
Wow – sounds like you got it bad sawatdeeka. Hang in there.
Sometimes the costume is the give away:
I can be fussy about the mechanism for exiting the men’s room, on account of witnessing that some of us are unaware of the soap and water available therein.
Your immune systems will be weak. Give them a challenge!
I think this one for me, too, because of it being drilled into me during nursing school. I will wipe my hands after pumping gas sometimes, but mostly because of the smell.
Number six, because certain family members like to pump every possible drop of gasoline into the tank. When its below zero, no one wants me to open the window to get rid of the gasoline smell on his hands. Hand sanitizer does nothing for the smell.
I have seen some public restrooms with a foot pull on the door, which can be awkward if you don’t have good leg strength or balance. Of course, the cleanest public restrooms are at Buc-ees….
Bingo. This unawareness is behind my car with door handles and gas pumps.
Local grocery store actually has a little bracket you can pull back with your foot to open the restroom door. At least the mens room does. I wonder about the ladies room.
When I taught high school I considered anything students had touched as contaminated. Even high school kids are germ factories. We had a staph outbreak one year and subsequently put up hand sanitizer dispensers everyplace. Of course, to lots of students readily available hand sanitizer meant they didn’t have to wash their hands.
9 and 10 definitely. I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t do those. I mean, what’s the downside?
I’m a little cautious exiting a bathroom. I often use a paper towel to open the door after washing my hands. Also, because my apartment doesn’t have hot water (it’s warm, not hot) I boil water and throw it into my sink to wash my dishes and utensils (something that’s not listed in the OP).
That’s about it.
#6 Gas pump handles have to be one the worst things for spreading disease because so many people hold them.
I fix it by washing my hands when I get home, even though a gas pump has nothing on a group of young children as a disease- spreading mechanism.
Or as some of us say “Live with a man!” (A male teen fits the bill quite nicely too. But you might have to enter their bedroom to realize this.)
4 out of 10. ;-)
A friend of mine refers to elementary schools (and nursery schools, for that matter) as extremely large petri dishes.
We do research on antibiotics in daycares.
Was sneezed and coughed upon on an airplane, repeatedly. I definitely hear you on this one. Just realized that experience was 20+ years ago. Slow down, time.