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| We have reminders similar to this at all our food spots. It's a lot like kindergarten. |
Anyone who has more than one child knows that if one gets
sick, the other gets sick, and then the parents get sick and then it cycles all
over again. God bless school teachers. I
have no idea how they’re not sick every single day of their lives. Little kids
are germ spreaders.
The best thing to do, of course, is to continually wash your
hands. Forget those sanitizers. Studies show that hand-washing is the best
thing to do to prevent the spread of germs. With all those kids sharing space,
it’s the proven way of halting germs.
This place doesn’t have any kids, but we’re teeming with
humanity. Many times, it’s hot and sweaty humanity, but even on the best
air-conditioned days, it’s still a bunch of people sharing spaces. So when one
person gets some kind virus, like a cold, it has the potential to shoot like
wildfire to the rest of us. For the most part, we all congregate in the food
spaces, especially. There’s more than one of them, but most people, at least
twice a day, are going to congregate in our feeding halls.
To combat fast-spreading colds (or worse), we’ve got to wash
our hands. One way to make sure we all do this is to not let us eat until we
do. I’m not sure if this would work with kindergartners, but boy, it seems to
work for hungry adults.
Prior to every meal, whether we eat in or take out, we have
to do two things. One is swipe our food cards, and that’s just because the
government counts everything. We’re not billed personally for our food, but
somewhere at pay grades higher than mine, someone has to calculate who ate
what. My guess is somewhere someone sets an average price for a meal and that
our little cards tell some system what my hiring mechanism is, like if I am a contractor,
direct hire or what. The bill, I suppose, goes from there. I really don’t know;
I just know that I have to tap my card before I can grab a tray and go through
the line.
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| Similar to a photo on the rotating announcements screen. It says something like, "This person forgot to wash her hands. "Don't be this person!" |
But before that, I have to wash my hands. It’s just kind of
silly to me, because, in general, the last thing I did before heading to the
food room was go to the bathroom and wash my hands. (Tip I heard this week: always
pee before you leave a building, because you never know what will happen before
you arrive at your destination.) But once I get to the food place, whichever
one it is, I have to wash them again.
And they make it obvious and easy. There are signs everywhere
to wash your hands, reminding us of the evil diseases that can spread. And
there are sinks. Many stations of sinks, like maybe a dozen. These bewildered
me at first, because there’s no handle and I thought that meant they were
motion-detected. The first meal, I waved
my hands under one after another, trying to turn one on. Finally someone bailed
me out; there’s a foot pedal. You pump it, add soap, wash and dry. And you can’t
eat until you do so.
Honestly, I have no idea how the person at the card-tap
place can possibly check everyone, because he or she is always busy assisting
with the take-out containers, but apparently they have been known to catch
people trying to sneak in with dirty hands.
There are several TVs going in the main food hall, and one
of them runs slides of announcements. There’s once slide with a photo of a
woman with her eyes censored out so you can’t identify her. I haven’t sat close
enough to that TV to read the fine print, but from what I understand it says
something about her not washing her hands. We’re into shame, I guess. But hey,
if you didn’t learn it in kindergarten, there’s just little hope for you now
and maybe shame is the best way to go.
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