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I want to start by saying I’m not proud of any of this.
That’s not entirely true. I’m a little proud of this. But I recognize that saying it out loud, to other men, in a public men’s room, at an Applebee’s, is not the way things are supposed to go. So this is me apologizing. Sort of. With some context.
Here’s the situation.
Let’s say I didn’t just walk out. Let’s say I wash my hands in the Applebee’s men’s room, fine, I do that, I’m a person. I wash my hands, I turn off the faucet, and at that point my clean hands are now touching a faucet handle that has been touched by every man who came through that bathroom before me. I don’t know those men. I don’t know what their situation is down there. I don’t know if they showered that morning, or the morning before that, or at what point in the last week they last gave their general area what I would call a thorough going-over.
I do know my situation. I shower every day. Usually twice. I use a separate dedicated product. I’m not going to get into the product because I’m not here to plug anything, also because last time I mentioned a product in a column the emails were insane. The point is I am rigorous. I have a system. My system works.
So what I’m telling you is this: when I touch that faucet handle to shut the water off, I am touching a thousand dicks. And honestly, a thousand is probably lowballing it. Dicks from men whose standards I cannot verify. Men who may or may not be doing what I do. Allegedly, some of them are doing nothing. You’ve been in the Applebee’s men’s room. You know.
When’s the last time somebody cleaned that sink?
The paper towel dispenser is the same situation. Worse maybe. At least the faucet is near the sink. The paper towel dispenser is over by the door, which is the most touched surface in the room, and it has one of those little chrome crank handles that you have to rotate around like a hundred times to get six inches of paper towel and I don’t know who decided that was a good design but it wasn’t someone who was thinking about this the way I think about this.
I said this to the guy next to me at the urinal. Not all of it. I’m not a maniac. I said it’s funny how you wash your hands and then you have to touch all this stuff to finish. Just making conversation.
He said yeah.
I said I shower twice a day. Also just making conversation. I was shaking out the last few drops and that’s the part where I said the part about touching a thousand dicks.
In retrospect that was too many words for a men’s room.
The guy washed his hands and left without drying them and that I don’t understand either because now he’s touching the door handle with his wet, thousand-dick hands, which is its own whole problem, and we’re all just supposed to be okay with this.
I’m not okay with this.
I don’t touch door handles in public men’s rooms. I wait for another guy to open it and then I nudge the door with my body to keep it going. One time at Chili’s I waited in there twenty minutes because it was a slow night.
Look. I understand that most guys in that situation are just trying to piss and wash their hands and get back to the one-thousand-dick Neighborhood Nachos they’re now sharing with their wives and they did not come to hear my position on the matter. I respect that. I am sorry for the disruption.
I’ll take my one-dick nachos, thank you.
But I want those men to know — specifically the three of them who were in the Applebee’s men’s room last night — that my hands are clean because my dick is clean, and I didn’t want them to inherit the germs of probably two thousand dicks and that’s why I didn’t wash my hands. And I was trying to share a concern that I think is real and that I think more people should be thinking about. I don’t just make small talk with other guys who are also holding dicks.
My name is Dave Kowalczyk. I fix cars. I have been fixing cars for thirty-two years. I wash my hands a lot. This is a professional requirement and also a personal commitment and I take both seriously.
I should not have opened with the dick thing. That’s on me.
But if you were there, and you’re reading this: I am cleaner than the faucet. I’m just saying. And so are you, probably. And we are all being done dirty by the crank on that paper towel dispenser, and I think on some level we all know it.
Tony agrees with me, for what that’s worth. He said he’d been thinking about this for years and was glad somebody finally said something.
He also said maybe not in an Applebee’s bathroom, but that’s a secondary issue.
This Guest Column was written by Dave Kowalczyk, Owner and Operator, Oil Be Damned Oil Change & Repair LLC, Downers Grove, IL. s’not news thanks Dave for his contribution. Oil Be Damned is not a public health authority but has touchless faucets and hand dryers, and automatic doors in both bathrooms.
