Do You Need Instructions to Wash Your Hands?
By: George Lee Cunningham
Just days after I made fun of Starbucks at Long Beach’s Marina Pacifica for posting a six-step restroom guide on how to wash your hands, the Orange County Register comes up with a story on the flu that includes – you guessed it – a six-step, almost-quarter-page guide with pictures on how to wash your hands.
The two hand-washing instructions are a little different.
The Starbucks hand-washing tutorial is:
- 1. Wet your hands
- 2. Put soap on your hands
- 3. Wash your hands
- 4. Rinse your hands
- 5. Dry your hands
- 6. Turn off the water
The Orange County Register hand-washing tutorial is:
- 1. Wet your hands
- 2. Take off your jewelry
- 3. Put soap on your hands
- 4. Wash your hands
- 5. Rinse your hands
- 6. Dry your hands
So the message is if you are in Orange County you need to take off your jewelry before you wash your hands, but you don’t need to turn off the water. In Long Beach, it’s OK to wash your hands with your rings still on your fingers, but you need to turn off the water when you are through.
This is somewhat complicated since I do sometimes wash my hand in Long Beach and at other times in the big OC. I don’t want to be an old poop with all this free advice going around about how to wash my hands, but I have been doing it by myself without any instructions for decades.
In fact, I have been doing it so long that I rarely think about it. But now that I am thinking about it, I realize that I usually wash my hands without removing my wedding ring, BUT I always turn off the water when I’m through.
I think that’s how I’m going to keep doing it no matter where I am, and just hope to God nobody in Orange County turns me in.
George Cunningham and his wife Carmela are writing a history of the Port of Long Beach. You can order George’s novel, Kaboom, at amazon.com
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