My petty gripe: our slovenly attitude to soap dispensers just won’t wash | Elias Visontay

For hygiene enthusiasts like me, a silver lining to the dark cloud of the Covid pandemic was the widespread awareness campaign on how to properly wash your hands, and the proliferations of hand sanitiser dispensers at most businesses.

Despite this huge leap forward for my community, a laissez-faire attitude to maintaining sanitiser and bathroom soap dispensers since the pandemic lockdowns eased has had dire consequences.

Nowhere are the stakes as high as with opaque dispensers, as the average punter has no way of knowing if they are empty or not.

There are few things worse than pushing down for soap or sanitiser, unaware that it is in fact empty.

Not only are your paws still in need of cleaning, they are now dirtier than before you attempted to wash them, as they have touched a surface that is exclusively touched by countless others with dirty hands.

It’s the equivalent of driving your car with the empty fuel light flashing to a service station and discovering they are clean out of petrol. You’ve burnt precious fuel in the odyssey to replenish it, yet you are ultimately left with an even more dire shortage of it.

This mortifying discovery sets me on a desperate mission to find somewhere to clean my hands. I’ve left a companion mid-meal in search of the bathroom in the pub next door after trying but failing to wash my hands in the restaurant’s toilet.

Unfortunately, this is a best-case scenario. I have been scarred by countless instances where I’m in a bathroom at a bar or public venue with multiple basins, and seen men walk up to neighbouring sinks, press for soap only to leave empty-handed, and walk right out of the bathroom as if cleaning their hands actually didn’t matter, as pointless as wearing a neck tie.

Not only that, when those same men exited, they opened the door with their germ-laden mitts, booby-trapping my own escape. These memories haunt me.

Despite Covid-era zombie sanitiser stations providing the veneer of a more hygienic society, this has ultimately been one giant leap backwards for mankind.

Until a future arrives where we have X-ray lenses embedded in our eyeballs, opaque dispensers must be outlawed.