Ahead of My Time
You see these everywhere now. My school even has these. The one pictured above is from the entrance to the supermarket on the ground floor of our apartment building. Hotels have them set up. I saw them at CEATEC. More and more, plastic pump-spray dispensers of alcohol-based hand wash and becoming ubiquitous (and thankfully, it’s the water-based stuff, not the icky snot-like transparent-lotion-cream stuff that used to be the norm).
And it turns out I am ahead of my time–I started using the stuff four years ago, when it was still hard to find. I could only find water-based wash at one place in Inagi, and when I moved to Ikebukuro, I bought six or eight extras which have lasted until now. And as I noted a few years back, they helped a lot–instead of catching colds several times a year, I am down to once or twice a year.
While I would like to claim to be a trend-setter, I am pretty sure that the real cause for the sudden mass use of this stuff is the Swine Flu–which, ironically, I caught anyway.
I have always caught a lot of colds. One year, 1999 I think it was, I got the flu shot around the 10th of October. They told me that if I don’t get sick in the next 11 days, then I won’t catch the flu that year. I got sick on the 9th day. For the next 25 weeks I was sick 15 of them. It was terrible. As a result, I haven’t gotten a flu shot again.
But when I read, four years ago your account. I started looking for the sanitizor. But right around that time I came to Korea and couldn’t find it anywhere. This year, its popping up everywhere and even my school has automatic dispensers in all the buildings:you put your hands in there and it sprays you. I carry little bottles around with me. My policy is, if I think of it, I sanitize my hands. This means over doing it a bit.
As a result I haven’t been over taken with sickness yet. I am, however, completely run down. We had a shortage of teachers this semester. I’m teaching seven classes. I’m so tired all the time that the other day, I actually left my withdrawal in an ATM machine. I didn’t realize it until 10 hours later when I got home. I’ve got mountains of work to do and I have to have it done by December 21. I hope I can make it to then without getting sick. If I do, it will be in part, because of what I read here four years ago. I’m a alcohol based, hand sanitizing machine.