Every time i use a public restroom, no matter where it is- an airport, a restaurant, a school, bar, hair salon, you name it, every time i finish washing/drying my hands, i use the paper towel to wipe down and dry the whole sink, including the soap dispenser, the faucet and the counter area surrounding the sink. To this day, i still do this, as others using the restroom look on in bemusement.
. . . and I’m wondering if anybody else still does this?
Ha ha! Really?! I went to boarding school as a young boy. The Royal Masonic school no less. The ‘rest room’ for the 45 boys in my ‘house’ consisted of two toilets, the seats of which had been pickled in urine for nigh on 70 years. The cistern for flushing each one was seven feet above one’s head, operated by a rusted chain, at the bottom of which, was a wrinkled, cracked, caked and hardened piece of India rubber with which to pull the chain. Needless to say, the water pressure of a couple of gallons of water released from seven foot high, was enough to wash away anything inserted into the bowl….except for the paper of course, which was Isal, made of some sort of waxed shiny, paper, totally impervious to the job for which it was intended and ultimately was more of a torture than a relief to use. The stench emanating from those toilets equalled the Somme battlefields on a hot summers day as 20,000 corpses rotted away on the blood-soaked fields.
The floor of course, was marble. Not to the Watchtower standard of course in their posh new building, but marble none the less. It had to be, swimming as it was in urine. Though there was a slab of marble screen between the two toilets, there was no door on the cubicle, though thankfully, a door to the room itself which housed these thrones of humiliation. The door handle was a beautiful example of late Victorian brass casting and had every appearance, even to my young eyes, of a serious threat to biological hygiene, harbouring as it did in its numerous embellishments of pattern, an incalculable host of disease and decay, excrement and various other excreta, too numerous to mention here. In short, even to the most hardened of children, these toilets by their stench alone, imbued the user with a sense terminal hygienic contamination.
The sinks with which to wash one‘s hands were in another room. There were about 50 of them, one for each inmate, and each one loaded with a bar of pure carbolic, with which to cleanse the hands, that dissolved the flesh, caused serious skin burns and cracked the skin. I still have the scars over my knuckles to this day. The sense of achieving cleanliness was unfortunately pro-rata to the sense of contamination, so hand washing could go on for untold periods of time as the carbolic dissolved away the skin.
The happy outcome was of course, to train the body into an extended routine of abstinence from such horrors, and I was successful in disciplining my body to a 48 hour routine. This of course halved my attendance on nature for the whole school term, and no doubt preserved my health. I know some boys resorted to using the drain in the shower room attached to the gymnasium as the lesser of the evil options open to us.
Anyway, my point is simply this. To this day I can enter and exit a public ‘restroom’ should the need arise (I do love American euphemism. Such public rooms are indescribable rather than restful), without touching a single surface, let alone actually attempting to clean the sink. In this case, the biblical description of faith is pertinent. ‘The assured expectation of things hoped for, but not yet beheld.’ What you hope has not been put down the sink you are attempting to clean, certainly has! Forget about the sink, just be grateful you got out alive!