Normally, it's a good thing to be wary of germs, and I applaud all instances of microbial warfare in all its forms. Except when it happens to go wrong, as it did the other day in the bathroom at our local YMCA.
I try to swim every morning. After 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 naked in the dressing room like some of the other gym patrons do.
Not like my aerobics teacher, who held a conversation with me while I was fully clothed and she was not. 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?
NOT FOR THE GERMAPHOBIC
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 in the water, 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 seatcover on the toilet seat so my bare bottom would not touch anything previously touched by the nether regions of other human beings.
So, I sat - an act I regretted almost immediately.
My skin was wet, and the substance the toilet-seat covers are made out of is engineered to love wet, embrace wet, make wet its own, become one with the wet.
Usually, these seatcovers are put into 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 were 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 fingernails. 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 to remove this mess. Scratch, clean fingernails, 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 obsessive-compulsive sufferer on crack, I ultimately prevailed upon the bacteria-laden goo to release its hold on me.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE
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 thera-py I'll stop screaming every time I enter a public restroom.
Freelance columnist Pamela Troeppl Kinnaird can be reached at needitor@nwlink.com.
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