Germ Warfare Gone Wrong

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5.April.2007

Normally it's a good thing to be wary of germs, and I applaud all instances of microbial warfare in all it's forms. Except when it happens to go wrong....oh so very wrong as it did the other day in the bathroom at our local YMCA.

I swim every morning. I mean I try to swim every morning. Ok, it's more of a water aerobics class than actual swimming, but it's still in the water and I'm flailing around, so lets call it swimming. After the swimming I'm pretty wet and tend to smell of chlorine, so I shower. Being the modest person that I am, I can't and won't walk around nekkid in the dressing room like some of the other gym patrons do. I've simply not got the .....whatever it is that passes for female cojones to do so. Not like my aerobics teacher who held a conversation with me while I was fully clothed and she was not. Who was, in point of fact, as naked as the day she was born. I was trying very hard to keep looking her in the eye and wishing I could be as unembarrassed as she was. Plus she was standing barefoot on the wet floor without benefit of flip flops, which gave me an attack of the icks. Who knows what germs live on that floor?

I told you that, to tell you this. There are two bathrooms in the main locker room that have doors. These doors close, thus ensuring privacy for using the facilities, or for dressing. I use them for both.

On this particular day I flailed, showered, then closed myself behind the safety of the bathroom door. Needing to use the facilities, I first did what any self-respecting woman with germaphobic tendencies does, I placed the thin white crinkly toilet paper seat cover on the toilet seat so my bare bottom would not touch anything previously touched my the nether regions of other human beings. You don't know where those other butts have been.

So, I sat. An act I regretted almost immediately. My skin was wet, and the substance the toilet seat covers are made out of are engineered to love wet, embrace wet, make wet it's own, become one with the wet. Usually they are put into the water of the toilet bowl after use and then it dissolves. Would you like to know what happens when it comes into contact with a slightly moist rear end? Super glue. Gooey, sticky, gelatinous gobs of tissue paper was stuck all over my gluteus maximus and down the backs of my legs. I reached around and tried to peel it off my tender bottom. No such luck. No peeling was possible because the stuff was glued to me! My fingers came back with specs of wet tissue attached to them. Again I reached around and tried to find an edge I could grab. Nope, no edges.

So I used my finger nails. It was like scratching skin with lotion on it, I left trails and scooped up the gooey gunk with my nails. I'd have to scratch every square inch of my derrière in order to remove this mess. Scratch, clean finger nails, scratch and clean again.

It took me a while but I finally managed to remove the majority of the offending goo and dress myself. It took me considerably longer to rid myself of the stuff under my fingernails. Scrubbing furiously, like an OCD sufferer on crack, the bacteria-laden goo ultimately released it's hold on me.

For a card-carrying germaphobe, such as myself, having the wet, gooey, germ-infested 'butt-gasket' attached to my tender epidermis caused me untold psychological damage. I'm hopeful that with copious amounts of chocolate therapy I'll stop screaming every time I enter a public restroom.

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