We're all becoming germ freaks

A while ago my wife came home from the store with a big jug of hand soap to refill the soap dispensers in our house. I picked it up and said, "you know this isn't antibacterial, right?" That's when panic set in.

She wanted to throw it away and immediately go buy another jug with antibacterial powers, but I refused. I knew soap in the olden days was made from potash and lard (in fact I made some for a science project in 5th-grade). So I figured that what was in the jug was just as good as the stuff people had been using for hundreds of years prior.

Indeed we were going to wash with it until it was gone, come what microbes may. Funny thing is, over the months that we refilled our soap dispensers with the non-antibacterial soap, we survived just fine.

Not that I was surprised, though. Any boy that's gone to a summer camp has spent a week without coming into contact with anything remotely related to soap--including toothpaste. To men not under the supervision of women, "washing up" is a water-free process consisting of wiping their hands on the front of their pant legs.

I've always had a bad habit of chewing on my pens. I also have a bad habit of never buying my own pens; I just use ones I find laying around or ones I forget to give back after signing my credit card receipt. Studies show pens are one of the most germ-laden things in an office, and I treat them like a piece of licorice.

These days, folks are just too obsessed with sanitation. We're scared of hand shakes, public transportation, and stair rails. I know people that go through their house once a week and Clorox every door handle and every hard surface in their home. This is all done while their kids are in the backyard eating dirt.

And then there's the instant hand sanitizer craze, the biggest "this is better for you" scam since the introduction of bottled water. The stuff kills 99.9% of the germs on your hands, but then the 0.1% left behind go ape because you knocked off all their friends.

I miss the pink powdery soap we used in elementary school; it was better than instant hand sanitizer. Boraxo was the brand name, I believe. It cleaned not so much by creating germ-killing suds, but by abrasion of the outer layer of skin.

I don't think we should stop washing our hands, I just think our germ-free world could loosen up a bit. We ought to get back outside and taste the dirt. We need to learn a lesson from man's best friend and drink water from the toilet. Or at very least, the tap.