Germ of an Idea

Amidst errand running, a friend and I met up in Target and decided to dash to Chick-fil-A for a quick lunch. When I returned home and began unloading my purchases, I realized I had probably been in the germiest places in Midland and not washed my hands before eating. As I tallied the morning's activities, I recounted that I had held the sign-in pen at the doctor's office, punched in the code on the bank keypad and gripped the handle of a Wal Mart cart. The only thing I missed was a nice germy flight on Southwest. I grabbed the soap and performed the belated 20 second absolution.

Then my brain started to whirl. What were the actual, factual germiest places in the environment? After scouring the Internet, I found there were lots of germaphobics and most of them were also plagiarists. I managed to trace the source of their information to an article in Health Magazine. To my amazement, my kitchen sink was a leading culprit. Supposedly, it was germier than the bathroom. (Did they mean a service station bathroom or my nice sparkly clean one?) A quick trip downstairs and a bottle of Clorox resolved the kitchen sink problem. Of course, I had to do a repeat on the hand cleansing since they had been previously washed in a dirty sink.

Now, this is so gross, that I wrestled with including it. In all fairness to you and your health, here it is. There is about a gram of feces in every pair of dirty underwear and we're not talking babies. YUCK! If you don't wash your undies in very hot water or dry them for a good forty-five minutes, they are full of E.coli. Plus, your hands are in the midst of all that bacteria while loading and switching the laundry. The only upside to this is, that it provides one with a wonderful reason to avoid doing laundry or an excuse to buy new underwear each week.

Not that the others matter after the last disclosure, but for your reference, here are some of the germiest places around.

Hotel remote
Playgrounds
Airplane bathrooms
Bathtubs
Telephones
Health Clubs

As upset as I was about the E.coli in the laundry, the cruelest blow of all was that the bottom of our purses (yes, our beloved shopping accouterments) are literally crawling with bacteria. Well, I'm not taking that revelation sitting down. My advice: give your purse a good spray with Lysol and hold it by the strap. Then get out there and shop! We shall overcome economic stagnation and bacteria one purchase at a time.