Hygiene vs Conservation

I'm all for personal hygiene. My kids might tell you I am fanatical about it. They'd be exaggerating. Like all moms, I insist they wash their hands periodically, brush their teeth twice a day, do a thorough job when bathing and hound them a little about being clean after using the washroom for a do-do.

If there was a scale to measure hygiene fanaticism - with 0 being a complete slop covered in layers of germ-infested slime and 10 being an unnaturally sanitised being in danger of scrubbing away skin and flesh in the quest for personal cleanliness - I think my score would be somewhere in the middle.

Germophobes who'd rank top on that scale amuse me a little. You can spot them from the way they wash their hands in public restrooms (if at all they use those). There is a normal hand-washing that most people do, and then there's the germophobe hand-washing which lasts a lot longer. I don't think surgeons going into the operation theatre do quite as thorough a job.

Anyway, I came across one of those at a restroom at Niagara on the Lake on Sunday. She made quite a production of cleaning her hands. Then she used the middle digits of her clenched fingers to yank some towels out of the dispenser. The elbows, feet and knees were then very creatively employed to dispose of the used paper towel, open the door and leave the washroom without contaminating her freshly washed hands by touching any surface whatsoever.

When she'd left I noticed the tap she had used was still gushing. That's when I got angry. She was so obsessed with hygiene that she didn't care she was wasting so much water! If I hadn't been in the restroom to turn that tap off, heaven knows how long it would have been left running. Hygiene is essential, but is it okay to seek it at the cost of such a precious resource?

Then there's the other extreme - conservation over hygiene. Singer Sheryl Crow has been the butt of quite a few jokes for suggesting that we all use just one square of toilet paper per bathroom visit. One stand-up comedian said he had immediately added her to the list of celebrities he'd never shake hands with. I agree. That's a tad too much, don't you think?