Work has been picking up lately, which is not a bad thing, but at my place of employment we use a lot of paper.
Do you know what happens when you work with a lot of paper? You get a lot of paper cuts. I know, I know, you’re telling me pull my skirt up and grow a pair, and you are correct. I should either learn to prevent them, or stop whining like a toddler who had his favorite toy taken away, except there is one catch.
The office in which I work is located a larger building that houses many other offices and a warehouse. This means that on any given day I come into contact with surfaces that have had another fifty hands come into contact with them. The bathrooms open into the break room, as well as the door from the parking lot.
How many times have you cleaned the underside of your car door handle? Yeah, most people could add up all those times and come up with the staggering sum of zero.
Now, I’m not a germaphobe, but I don’t like the idea of getting sick due to some twenty-something asshole deciding that wiping her hands on her shirt makes them surgery-level clean and ready to grab every handle in the public space.
The other day I saw this individual leaving the break room with a plate of whatever was left in the fridge on a plate. I wanted no part of having any bugs that her bugger pickers had distributed amongst the devices, so I naturally made a bee line to the large vat of hand sanitizer after retrieving my vittles from the refrigerator. That’s when it happened. Christ, oh, Christ, had I made a bad decision. Unfortunately I was to find that this was only the first link in a chain made entirely of suffering.
After the initial application my hands felt like I had jabbed them into bags of loose needles. At the very same moment I felt each individual cut. It’s like they were all cutting again, building to a crescendo of face-cringing pain accompanied by my toddler whimperings. Tears started escaping my eyes, even though I had them crammed together as tightly as a bank vault door.
Did I go grab a paper towel? Nooooooooooooooooooo. That would be too much trouble, and quite womanly. I’m a man I wiped my eyes with my fingers. OOOOWWW- I NOW HAVE FUCKING ALCOHOL IN MY EYES! Yep, so very manly. Also so very blinding.
Do you know how tears taste salty? That’s because there’s salt in them. I washed the alcohol of the sanitizer off of my fingers with salt water. Paper cuts don’t like saltwater either.
At this point I decided at this point that a bathroom washout of all affected areas. I had finally made a smart decision. As it turns out: nope.
Door handles are so very hard to see when your eyes are full of lava. Luckily I have a curb feeler for just such an occasion. Most people call it a forehead.
Moral of the story: Hand sanitizer is more painful than any shot you can get for being sick.
