Fast-Food Restrooms & Buckets of 'Bugs'

Yesterday I was desperate. No time to eat lunch, and no choice of restaurants, but really hungry. I walked into a local fast-food place on the north side of Edmond (you would know it --they have locations everywhere in the known world). ("100 Billion Served?" How about 100 Billion potentially infected?). Not wanting to be sued, I will not mention their name. It makes no difference. MOST fast-food places are just like it. I would rather eat a bucket of bugs than go into one. Here's how I got there! I wanted to wash my hands before eating, so I did just that. Then I noticed, while standing there with water dripping from my hands, that they only had wall-mounted electric hand-drying devices. I did the best I could with the 'electric paper towels' and then walked toward the door. The idiots who designed the bathroom doors in this public restroom designed it so one has to grab a door-handle to pull the door open....with no paper towels. This includes the employees who make up your food order. They, too --- being in a hurry, and with no one watching, did 'their business' and walked out of the restroom, having just opened the door by grabbing the filthy, WET door handle, and went right back to making up your food order. The only stop on the way, is likely their fast use of a broom and dust pan or mop to clean up the floor of the restaurant -- before heading behind the counter to bag up your order...likely without bothering to wash their hands! Now, back to the rest room...better known as the 'germ dispenser'.

You have to touch the handle with your bare hands. In doing so, you might as well be sticking your hands into the pants of the last 10,000 people who visited that bathroom! It's worth noting that the majority of people who use public bathrooms NEVER wash their hands after handling various parts of their anatomy while attending to their private bathroom needs...unless you are standing at a urinal (if you're a guy) and they know you're watching. So, when you walk up to the food counter to order your food, and some person asks you "you want fries with that?", they are, of course, asking you if you'd like fries with the filth you picked up on the wet door handle in the john! 10,000,000,000,000 (Obama bail-out numbers!!) filthy germs you just picked up in their germ-infested bathroom with the antibiotic-resistant germs running amuck all over the door handle that you have to grab to get out of the death trap they call a 'rest room'. 'Rest Room', indeed! A better name for this sort of public 'facilities' would be: 'LAST STOP ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL'....! (Can you spell 'E-COLI'?...or 'antibiotic-resistant staph?'...or MERSA?).

I can't undo the design of brain-dead architects, fast-food franchise owners, and other establishments with uneducated, archaic, insensitive ways of looking at public health. But I CAN deal with it in MY WAY. My way is to first -- before walking into the fast-food restroom, go to the napkin dispensers and walk away with a big wad of paper napkins. I tuck them into my shirt pocket and then, after washing my hands and drying them with paper, I then walk over to the door handle, and with dry paper napkins, open the door safely! If there is a trash can near the door, I toss the paper napkins into the receptacle.

IF THERE IS NO TRASHCAN NEAR THE DOOR, I TOSS THE PAPER NAPKINS ON THE FLOOR, RIGHT NEXT TO THE DOOR. OTHERS MUST BE THINKING THE SAME THING, BECAUSE I OFTEN SEE PILES OF PAPER ON THE FLOOR NEXT TO THE DOOR OF THE BATHROOM. When the establishment begins paying for enormous quantities of paper napkins, they may decide to fix the door, so that one can open the door with one's elbow or the push of a foot near the bottom of the door.

By now you think I'm a nut case. That's okay. I understand. But wait--here's another one for you to think about. I was in another popular 'restaurant' the other day, near Bryant and Memorial Rd. It was late in the evening and the restaurant was not crowded. A man -- probably in his 50's with black hair was mopping the floor. His hair was as black as coal, but...only his hairdresser knows for sure about the hair color. He was mopping the floor, with no apparent enthusiasm. Every now and then he would stop and walk behind the counter. After all, three or four swats across a little piece of the floor with that fetid mop would wear ANYONE out. With no washing of his hands, he picked up a tiny spoon from a containe of micro-spoons used for people to 'taste' different flavors of ice cream before making their selection. He then reached down into one of the containers of ice cream and scooped out some ice cream and deposited the wad of ice cream into his mouth. He then went back to mopping. He did this three times while I was eating my meal. "That's great, I thought -- just great!" No one paid him any mind. It didn't matter that the workers preparing the food at the grill wore plastic gloves, as though they were doing a surgical procedure. THIS GUY DIDN'T -- and his filthy hands -- from mopping up the restaurant (handling the bucket, the mop, the litter on the floor, etc.), kept reaching right down into the ice cream buckets--a different one each time...wielding tiny plastic spoons. Each selection of ice cream was done with great deliberation and no apparent haste. I'm SURE his hands NEVER TOUCHED the ice cream...aren't you? I'm just almost --nearly-- certainly positive!..........maybe. Yeah---RIGHT! (Try mentally going into a big container of hard ice cream with a tiny, flexible plastic spoon that might be an inch and a half long and try to scoop ice cream with your plastic spoon without dragging your knuckles all over the ice cream in the bucket -- it's impossible!). It also did not go unnoticed that the large lady behind the counter kept hacking rattling, phlegmy coughs into her left hand, over and over, while she prepared some wonderful milk shakes and a 'mix' for some lucky, unsuspecting patron at the drive-up window, who drove away, blissfully ignorant of what had just happened. (I wonder who was her beneficiary on her life insurance policy?) "YUMMY! Where do I sign up for some of that?", I thought, as I did a quick but thorough optical scan of the remainder of my hamburger. At this point, I'm super-vigilant, and looking over my nub of a hamburger with x-ray vision, imagining all sort of possible scenarios involving the preparation of MY hamburger. I almost didn't eat the last bite.

Want to live to a ripe old age? Want your kids to stay a little healthier, and have an even chance of growing up? Then be careful where you eat. Check out the bathroom first. If you have to grab the handle to get out of the bathroom, don't eat there! You may end up paying with more than money for the privilege of dining there. You may even pay with more than 'intestinal distress'....you may pick up something along the way that will change your life in ways you don't want. These days, it may take more than Pepto Bismol to ease your intestinal discomfort if you fall victim to the Fast Food Germ Slingers --- the Dirty Harry's of Dining.

O.K.--- now you've branded me as a lunatic. That's okay. I don't mind. I feel that it is important to highlight a public danger. We live in a world where people are dying every day from 'community acquired diseases.' Antibiotics are losing the war against some of the formerly fairly benign 'bugs' that are found on every surface in the world. Peoples' incomes and lives are affected by sickness. Medical costs are skyrocketing. And, with alll of this going on in our world, idiots are still building public facilities with bathroom doors that have to be opened by hand by people who, in large part, do not wash their hands. They do things with their hands that have consequences for other people.

I'm happy, knowing that I will not be as likely to pick up a case of the 'Tennessee Quick-Step' or end up in the hospital, with a case of antibiotic-resistant staph. This resistant little bug killed my sister in Dallas a few years ago when she went into the hospital for a pretty minor surgery, as surgeries go. She got the staph infection at the site of her surgery. Her name was Nancy Kocher. She never left the hospital alive.

We can't kill all the germs in the world, but doesn't it make sense to protect people in public places with just a little common sense? Especially in public restaurants, where there is such a huge risk to the public. Do your family a favor...look at bathrooms in public eating establishments and how they are constructed and serviced. Also, watch to see if the food handlers are also wielding mops and cleaning tables and handling money and then go right back to food preparation without washing their hands with soap and water.

For my part, I would rather eat a bucket of bugs than eat at a fast-food restaurant!