The other day I was in the ladies' room at work and a co-worker started talking about the water pressure of the toilets. The truth is, it's kind of hit or miss in there. One time the pressure will be great and everything goes down easily. Another time you can hold the handle for what seems like five minutes and nothing but water goes down.
Meanwhile, there are signs posted all over the bathroom and stalls saying to hold the handle down until EVERYTHING (including paper) goes down.
Which brings us to my co-worker's comments. She was telling me that she flushes with her foot because the handle has germs and she can't balance herself well on one foot. Then she told me she'd had this conversation with my boss and that my boss agreed.
It got me to thinking. Does the toilet handle have some magical properties whereby touching it removes all the germs you may have had on your hand?
For the sake of argument, let's say it does. So, all those people who use their hands to flush the toilet have had their hands magically sanitized before they touch the stall lock. But what about those people who use their feet to flush the toilet? Their hands weren't magically sanitized so their germs would be on the stall lock, wouldn't they? Perhaps they somehow use their feet to unlock the stall too, I don't know. I didn't ask.
Then you have the water faucet and the door handle. We can pretend these things all have magical properties but the reality is, they don't.
When I go to the ladies' room in a public place, I flush with my hand. I open the stall with my hand. I turn on the water faucet, with my hand. But once soap and water has touched my hands, I don't touch anything else in the bathroom. I turn off the water with a paper towel and I use the paper towels I dried my hands off with to open the bathroom door with. I dispose of those paper towels outside the bathroom.
My co-worker, however, flushes with her foot (thanks for the extra germs, by the way), opens the door in an undetermined manner, uses her bare hand to turn on the water faucet and uses her bare hand to open the bathroom door. It could just be me but for some reason, that just seems backwards.
