One
thing I didn’t need the other night, during this whole coronavirus madness, was
to see a rerun of a TV show that aired a few years ago. It featured a guy who
was promoting his book about deadly bacteria and germs hiding in people’s
houses.
As
if I didn’t already have enough to worry about.
Funny,
but until I saw this “germ pro” on TV, your average run-of-the-mill household
germs were not something I spent extended periods of time thinking about. This
guy, however, made it sound as if we were at war, and the germs were
winning. I can only imagine what he
must be doing now during this pandemic, if germs concerned him so much way back
then. He's probably been hermetically sealed in a plastic bubble since March.
The
worst place for germs, he said on the TV show, is the bathroom. “Before you
flush the toilet, you MUST put the seat’s lid down,” he emphasized. “If you
don’t, millions of bacteria will go flying up into the air as far as 20 feet,
all over your towels, your sink and toothbrushes! You wouldn’t believe how many deaths have been caused by bathroom
germs alone!”
Heck,
I figured I should have been dead years ago. My husband rarely even put
the toilet seat down, never mind closed the lid.
“And
carpeting is another breeding ground for germs!” Mr. Doom-and-Gloom continued.
“There are dust mites, hairs, dirt, tracked-in animal waste, spoiled food
particles and much more, all hiding in the fibers. And when you vacuum, all you succeed in doing is blowing all of
those germs out into the air you breathe indoors. So if you have carpeting, get rid of it! Get hardwood or tiled floors. They are so
much more sanitary.”
I
sat there staring at my living-room rug, where I was certain safaris of
millions of hideous, fang-toothed germs were gathering at that very moment, forming an army in preparation for
an attack. Suddenly I didn’t even want
to set my feet down on it.
I
was just about to change the station and switch to a less frightening show,
like a rerun of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, when the germ expert
announced that he was going to visit one of the TV show’s producers and test
her house for bacteria. Curiosity
forced me to keep watching.
The
woman’s house was so sparkling clean when he arrived, I was pretty sure she had
hired a squadron of maids in anticipation of his visit. Her kitchen counters
were spotless, her floors were so shiny they looked as if an Olympic skater
could do a double axel on them, and her stove was so clean, I figured she’d
probably ordered take-out food for every meal for the past 20 years.
The
germ expert immediately set to work rubbing cotton swabs over every surface,
nook and cranny in the kitchen. He
paused to glare at a sponge on the back of the woman’s kitchen sink.
“It’s
damp,” he said, his tone accusing as he touched it with only the very tip of one finger
and then backed away in horror. “Germs LOVE damp things! Dry sponges don’t attract bacteria. Wet
sponges do!”
As
I sat there wondering if I should leap up and go blow-dry my sponges, he rammed
a cotton swab into the sponge. “Just wait until you see how much bacteria is
living in this sponge!” With each word, his voice began to sound more and more
like an evil cackle.
He
then made his way into the bathroom.
The toilet seat gleamed so brightly, it looked as if you’d need a
seat belt to keep yourself from sliding off it.
“Sure,
it LOOKS clean,” the man said to the poor woman, “but just watch how many germs
I collect on this swab!” He almost gleefully ran the swab over the toilet
seat. His eyes then caught sight of
the soap dish on the bathroom sink and his swabbing abruptly stopped.
“BAR
soap?!” he exclaimed with a look of such undisguised revulsion, you’d think
he’d just discovered a clump of dog poop sitting on the sink. “Bar soap is one
of the worst carriers of germs! You
MUST switch to soap in pump bottles!”
Needless to say, the woman’s
test results from the swabs proved that her spotlessly clean house was carrying
more germs than Typhoid Mary. I
suspected that maybe the guy had tampered with the tests just to psych people
into buying his book, but still, the test results terrified me. I mean, if Mrs.
Clean really had failed her test, then I, whose two huge dogs have made it
their mission to make certain my house hasn’t been spotlessly clean since the
first day I moved into it, am doomed to be wearing a toe tag at any minute.
The
germ guy’s sadism became even more apparent when he went on to discuss
supermarket shopping-carts.
“Think
of all the germ-covered hands that touch the handles on those carts,” he said.
“These shoppers are picking up packages of meat and poultry loaded with
salmonella, getting blood and bacteria on their hands and then grasping the
handles on the shopping carts. And the seats in the carts are even worse!
Toddlers with leaky diapers sit on them, and then unsuspecting women set their
purses on the seats and end up turning those purses into germ-infested potential lethal
weapons.”
That
did it. I changed the station. Up until
that moment, I had felt safe in my house, my sanctuary from the coronavirus.
Now
I’m thinking I might be safer if I pitch a tent out in my yard and live in that
instead…and then erect an outhouse next to it, so I won't have to worry about flushing.
# # #
Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and
the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The
Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at:
sillysally@att.net.
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