Now wash your hands

I don’t know if users of ladies’ toilets know this, but lots of men don’t wash their hands after using the loo. I know this, because when I’m in a public restroom I’ll often see men go straight from the urinal or stall to the door without visiting the washing facilities. Dyson must weep. Now, as a man who washes, I have nothing but contempt and disgust for these people, in spite of being a regular reader of SMBC comics.

What gets my goat even more, however, is when the soap stinks. And it very often does. And when it does, it almost always stinks in the same way! I can guess why the manufacturer makes it: people manifestly buy it and presumably it’s cheap. But I don’t know why people buy it, because it smells so terrible that if you knew beforehand what it was going to smell like, you wouldn’t use it. You’d clean your hands with the thermal energy from more hot water and the kinetic energy from rubbing your hands instead of the chemical energy from the soap. I assume that one kind of energy cleans about as well as another.

So there are a few things that annoy me about this situation. One is that it makes my hands smell bad. Bad enough to take to my blog about it, even though I don’t write much anymore. Another thing that annoys me is that I’m being punished for washing my hands, when those Neanderthals I mentioned at the start of the post are getting off scot free. And their uncleanliness is as likely to make someone else ill as it is to affect them, if my understanding of epidemiology is correct. I’m being punished for being a responsible citizen, and that’s not cool. And the third thing is that I’m not even getting a choice in the matter. They’re only able to skimp on soap by doing what effectively amounts to playing a mean trick on me: “Hey, why don’t you try this soap?” “Er, OK.” “Ha! Now your hands stink! Now buzz off, stinky hands!” That’s how I feel in the moments immediately after I’ve taken my chances with an unfamiliar soap dispenser and the familiar stink wafts up from my hands. I try to wash it off, but it’s too late. I guess I could start carrying some hand sanitizer around with me, but I don’t feel I should have to. Maybe that’s what the Neanderthals are doing.