Let me say right off that I generally have no problem with people washing their hands.  There are many cases where cleaning one’s hands is a mandate.  Like the doctor after he gives you a prostate exam.  After a particularly productive sneeze, assuming you use your hands like a human and don’t do that vampire looking thing where you explode into the bend of your arm.  Or after you check the oil or change a tire.  It all makes sense.  As long as you perform this action in a certain order.

You wouldn’t eat your pizza or fried chicken and then think, “I should have washed my hands after changing junior’s diaper.”  You wouldn’t wash your hands to go work in the yard.  There is an order here that makes sense.

That’s why it disturbs me that there appears to be a good many people out there who are washing their hands before they use the bathroom.  It would be easy for you to say at this point, what does it hurt?  I’ll tell you.  My brain.

It is a completely useless action and lacks any ties to reason or prudent judgment.    They are snubbing rationality.  They are obviously confused with respect to the linear flow of time and the very essence of cause and effect.  I question the very soul of any individual performing this flawed and unusual action.  Just to be clear, I would not let a doctor operate on me who washed his hands before using the bathroom.  Why you say?  Someone that confused as to the order of things could possibly sew me up first and then remove my appendix.  They might prescribe me a medicine and then send my blood off to be tested.  I think they do this anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, these people are still washing their hands after they do number one, and I don’t have beef with that.  And if you are laying asphalt for a road crew, I’m not suggesting you run to the Porto-Pottie and wrap molten tar around your gold-member without washing first, but that’s an anomaly.  The people I see doing this are in offices and cubicles.  It seems common sense that blue collar workers, people who pulp wood, work in iron shops, fix cars, and are generally knee deep in the grit and grim of everyday living, would actually be less inclined to OCD tendencies concerning cleanliness than someone who doesn’t know how to check their transmission fluid.  They are less paranoid.  They don’t submerse their arms to the elbows in a bucket of Germ-X just because they walk out of Wal-Mart or pet their dog.  I suppose white collar phobics who sit in front of a computer all day have more time to do, well, what I’m doing now.  Surfing the Internet and reading about germs instead of performing a useful function.  As exampled by any conspiracy theorist, the more information you have about anything, the more paranoid and delusional you will become.  Talk to a person in charge of counterterrorism and you’ll never open a piece of mail or ride a bus again.  Talk to someone at the CDC for a couple of hours and you’ll feel your throat swelling shut every time someone coughs in your vicinity.

But even if being over-informed is to blame for this delusional behavior, that doesn’t explain why they wash their hands first.  I could see scrubbing them after the fact until they turn red and blister, but doing it prior makes no sense.  Germs usually enter the body through openings, hand to mouth in general.  I don’t see someone infecting that body part with bacteria from common office equipment.  I can hear the doctor now.  I’m sorry to have to tell you this Mr. Bailey, but it looks like you have an acute keyboard infection on your penis.

The Mayo Clinic, the CDC, the WHO, they all give the same advice on when to wash your hands.  After using the restroom.  Never do they say before.

I am also concerned that these Firsties will, like all deranged people who are infected with extraneous and afflicted ideas, eventually carry this on to the next level.  I don’t wish to enter the bathroom only to find a colleague scrubbing his junk in the sink like Meryl Streep in Silkwood.  Or perhaps, since urine is acidic and actually kills bacteria, find the same person wetting their hands down thoroughly in front of the urinal.  It has to stop.

I’ll do my part by leaving these conspiracy theorists with some useless and harmless information they can be paranoid about and then misapply to their philosophies with deformed logic.  Some soaps have been shown to cause irritation to the urethra.  This can make it easier for bacteria to get inside your body and proliferate.  Once the bacteria are inside your body, they will multiply at a geometric rate inside your bladder.  These are infectious living things that will be living inside of you.  And the only way a doctor can remove them at this point is with a Q-Tip and a pair of tweezers.