“These days,” a friend of mine recently said, “sneezing or coughing in public is pretty much like shouting ‘Allahu akbar.'”
This is true, in my experience. Riding the F train yesterday afternoon, my throat felt a little dry. It wasn’t sore but closer to what we call a “tickle.” So I cleared it a bit (nothing more than a simple, short ahem) and immediately felt the hot gaze of my subway carmates searching me for signs of infection.
Washing our hands for 20 seconds or more, three times a day, at least, is something we’re all supposed to be doing anyway, but speaking for myself, I more often than not do a quick rinse or skip the process altogether. But I’m careful to lie about it, which is exactly the kind of hypocrisy that built the world’s great civilizations. We have to maintain standards, if only in our public proclamations. Because if you live in a city and take public transportation, or go anyplace where lots of people shuffle and sniffle and cough their way through each day, such as a school or a workplace or a shopping mall, it’s fair to say that you’re a lot filthier than you think you are.
But your phone is even more contaminated. According to a recent survey, about 75% of people say they use their phones in the toilet, which means about 99% of them actually do. I have seen gentlemen standing in the men’s room, one hand on their phone, scrolling through, well, Twitter, I guess. Maybe the ESPN app. But does it really matter? It’s disgusting behavior. And we’ve all been in a public restroom and heard a cellphone ring behind a closed stall door, then heard a “Hello?” followed by, “Oh, nothing much. What’s up?”
You can wash your hands all you want, using lye or sulfuric acid if you want to, but unless you also use an antibacterial wipe on your phone, you’re probably wasting your time.
I didn’t think much about Biohazard Phone Syndrome until I remembered what happened to me a few years ago, as I was taking my dog on her morning walk. We walked along the beach in Venice while I was on a conference call with a production team in New York. Since the East Coast is three hours ahead of the West Coast, I find that I can do a lot of business with East Coast colleagues while it’s still early morning in California, which is a euphemistic way of saying that on most East Coast-West Coast conference calls, I am within moments of being asleep in bed. That day was no different, except I had somehow managed to feed the dog and begin our walk when the call began.
Let me put this delicately. I was cleaning up after my Labrador, and I learned the following lesson: If you bend over some dog refuse with your phone in your shirt pocket, it will tumble out into the pile that the Labrador has left on the boardwalk, sticking up from it like one of those wafers in a dish of ice cream.
The good news: I was using Bluetooth headphones at the time. That meant that I could stand about 10 feet away from the disaster and continue my conference call as if nothing had happened. When the call concluded, I scooped up the entire package — waste, iPhone, all of it — and threw it all out together. What was I supposed to do? Wash it off?
And then, I went to the local Apple store and bought a new iPhone. It was there that a helpful customer service person told me that most phones are teeming with septic bacteria, and had I delicately removed my phone from its perch and wiped it down with antibacterial wipes, it would probably have been cleaner than the phones most people carry around with them.
I was nevertheless dead set on getting a brand new, box-fresh phone. And though I may falter in the recommended three-hand-washes-per-day habit, not a day goes by that I don’t take my bacteria-ridden virus trap of an iPhone and wipe it until it smells lemony fresh. Also, I no longer carry it in my shirt pocket.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
