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As I lied peacefully in my bed last night, dreaming completely innocent dreams that my mother would definitely not consider indecent, I awoke suddenly. I sat up in bed and felt a little tickle in my throat. I let out a cough, mostly just to clear my throat, but it didn’t go away. A few more coughs put me at ease—that’s not to say that the tickle turned scratch had gone away, but I felt like I had made an effort to remedy the situation and therefore could go back to sleep feeling accomplished.
Fast forward a few hours. It’s 6:30 a.m. My alarm is going off. I sit up in bed feeling like I can barely breathe, let alone speak. I chugged a glass of water, threw back some DayQuil, and took a warm shower but nothing helped.
This is it. This is Stage 1 of me getting sick. Which brings me to the title of this column.
Wash your fucking hands.
Seriously. Wash them. This doesn’t seem like too outlandish of a request to me, and yet people fail to do it. Want to know how many times I’ve gone to take a leak in the office and saw one of my colleagues, someone I respect the opinions of, flush the toilet and exit the fucking bathroom like a god damn barbarian? Too many to count. Got any ideas of how many emails we’ve had to send around my office reminding people to wash their hands before they eat? I just filtered them. There have been 12…in the last 5 weeks.
It doesn’t stop, there. Even my own roommate (sorry E, I know you read these), is deathly ill right now. Okay, she’s not dying, but it certainly sounds like she is the way her nose is stuffed up and she can barely talk because she’s either coughing or in pain. The walls are thin, and I know there are times when she goes to the bathroom and does that bullshit thing where you run your hands under some lukewarm water in a half-assed attempt to seem like you’re conscious of germs.
I’m not OCD and I’m not a germophobe. Not by any means. One time, I had a bagel with cream cheese fall cheese-side-down on the carpet and I still took a bite out of it. What was I going to do, let it go to waste? All I’m asking is to be conscious of yourself and those around you. As a firm believer in the Zombie Apocalypse, all it takes is one person plunging their hand into a bag of pretzels after taking a giant dump without washing their hands to send us collectively as a society into a giant frenzy that culminates with someone getting their skull bashed in with a baseball bat.
So here’s my call to action: tell your friends, tell your parents, tell your coworkers, brothers, sisters, neighbors, whoever. Tell them to wash their hands. Tell them that it’s cold and flu season and that we don’t want that shit spreading around the office. And finally, tell them that if you do, in fact, catch them going to the bathroom and not washing their hands, you will call them out in a public forum and humiliate them. Because lord knows, that’s what I’m going to do.
Wash your fucking hands..
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Charlie
Using sarcasm as a defense mechanism since 1993. At any given moment I'm either tired, drunk, or stressed out. Get at me at charliepgp@gmail.com or whatever.
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Blatantly not washing hands after taking a dump in front of your coworkers is savage, but I doubt that’s where most of the office sickness comes from. I’m much more afraid of the parents in the office who come in looking like death and hacking and sneezing all day. WE HAVE PAID SICK LEAVE FOR A REASON, BRENDA!
Damn it if we all don’t know a Brenda that we hate.
Break the cycle of presenteeism, guys.
Want me to hate you? Come to work and sneeze all day.
Every disease to strike my office can be traced to someone with kids getting sick and contaminating us all. WASH YOUR KIDS HANDS, FACES, FEET, WHATEVER
I caught a coworker pulling a no-wash after taking a shit. That was about 10 days ago. I’ve been sick for a week now. Any suggestions on revenge?
Take a dump on his desk after hours
and then don’t wash your hands after, and wipe them all over his keyboard, ya know, cause poetic justice and stuff
If you’re not washing your hands after a dump, there’s no telling what other kind of grossness you’re getting up to.
Super glue all his stationary to his desk.
Go for the jugular. Steal his stapler.
Put his stapler in in jello.
I had this old fuck that was real nasty to me at one of my first jobs. Put a bunch slices of salami in between the paper contents of a particularly large folder and put the folder at the bottom of his desk drawer when I quit. Beware, the feeling is incredibly intoxicating.
I am not a scientist, but I feel like you can wash your hands too much. Your body has an immune system, let it do some work.
“The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter…”
To quote the great show, Seinfeld “even if you’re not gonna soap up just pretend! For my benefit, run the water, do something!”
definitely done this before, ngl. i am a gross human.
sup?
Charlie, have you been drinking straight paint again?
Great article Charlie, thank you for raising awareness! I find this to be equally true for flippers
But what if you don’t touch it and just do the pullover the briefs approach? Asking for a friend…
“We don’t want that shit spreading around the office.” Literally.
I hear you on this one, but I’m actually way more grossed out by phones, keyboards, and door knobs/railings. Nobody EVER cleans those, and everyone touches them.
I used to work with a senior manager who would always have to stop off at my desk to sign things. I would always let her borrow a pen until a work friend showed me the list she accumulated over the years of people who don’t wash their hands. That senior manager was on it. From there on out, Ihad a special pen on my desk for her.
Poop pen. Slick.