Hand Sanitizer Necessary

While I was walking over to the stacks to retrieve a book for someone, I spied something on the floor that was grossly out of place, with emphasis on grossly. I thought to myself that I should pick it up, lest some small child find it and eat it, but the idea of picking it up bare-handed was too heinous to consider, and I made a mental note to get some napkins or tissues to pick it up. However, as is fairly typical, by the time I completed the task I was working on, the alien item sitting on the floor had slipped my mind and I went back to another project.

Later, I was helping a patron at the desk when my boss wandered out of the office, saw the foreign item on the floor, and automatically picked it up and set it on the desk next to me.

Me: Blah, I was going to get that, but I forgot about it. Did you just pick that up with your bare hands?

Boss (looking concerned): Yeah.

Me: OHGOD, hand sanitizer!

Patron: Do you even know what that is?

Boss (looking more concerned): No.

Me: YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW. Wash your hands. You’re better off not knowing.

He began squirting a single pump of hand sanitizer onto his hand, looking worried and staring at the item.

Okay, yes, I am a germ phobe, and I have a hypersensitive creep-out nerve, as well as a delicate gag reflex, so one must temper my heaving with a bit of reality. Yet the look of disgust on my face must have given him an indication that he really needed to disinfect.

Patron: That’s a toe separator! Women put it between their toes when they paint their nails.

He went straight from worried to panicked and gave himself a few more squirts of hand sanitizer before scurrying off with a full-body case of the heebie-jeebies. A brave soul picked it up off the desk with some tissues and threw it away.

Laughs were had, but no one even bothered asking what the hell a toe separator was doing on the floor of the public library. I work in that kind of library. It’s amazing I haven’t contracted some rare, incurable disease yet.

Oh wait, I have. Never mind.