Everything Is Dirty

I was listening to the radio today and a guy was talking about how gross it is to touch your phone and then eat with your bare hands. Think about all the places you've set your phone down, or how dirty your hands have been while you were holding your phone. Of course, I was listening to this just minutes after I'd held my phone in my teeth for a second while I was looking for my keys. I read something similar about purses and how they're actually the dirtiest things.

But this stuff doesn't really bother me. You can't always think about stuff like that because it just never ends. EVERYTHING IS DIRTY. Examples:

Let's think about eating at the food court in the mall. Maybe you washed your hands before eating, and there's that weird trust we all have in our food preparing associates that they did the same. But is the table you're eating at clean? Is the tray clean? Did those paper plates all fall on the ground but someone picked them up and decided to use them anyways? Did someone sample some food with that fork and then rinse it off and give it to you to use? Did a crazy person dip the plastic forks in the ebola virus while everyone else had their backs turned? The answer to all of these questions: Maybe. You can never be positive that everything is clean. For all you know, the factory that those utensils were made at is crawling with rats and they used the plastic fork boxes as a bathroom. You weren't there, you don't know.

The exact same situation can be applied to straws. Some people won't drink from cans because there might be mouse poop on the tops. How do you know there wasn't a straw accident where hundreds of straws were dropped all over the ground and then people just picked them up and put them in boxes anyways? Employees at Straws Inc. don't give a dingle whether your straws are clean or not, they just want to fix their problem as quickly as possible. And what if the dude who closes all the straw boxes had a runny nose or sneezed or something and got your straws all mucousy? You don't know.

What about in your own house? Is your table clean? I mean, I guess you can clean it and then you'll know it's clean... But is it REALLY clean? You can't see germs. How do you know they're not there? You probably missed only one germ, and it was the one that will kill you. Or something. I know it's not likely at all, but HOW DO YOU KNOW? Is that scary?

I think about my own house. My dog always sets his chin on the table because he thinks it makes him look cute so we'll give him food. But wait... Did he just go outside and munch on a rotting squirrel carcass? Did he just sniff a little too closely to a pile of coyote excrement? I DON'T KNOW. And even worse is that he sleeps in my bed.

The thing is, all you have to do is touch one unclean surface and then touch a clean surface with the same hand/elbow/wrist/forehead and boom, the clean surface is now unclean. Where am I going with this? Stop thinking about germs so much. It's pointless. But you should probably still wash your hands and shower. Use hand sanitizer and cough into your elbow crease, not onto your hands. There are obviously things we can do to prevent spreading more germs, but there is no way to prevent all germs, so why do we think about things like that so much and why do idiot radio hosts think it's a good idea to point out stupid things like this?