Friday, February 15, 2008

Never forget

I was washing my hands today in the men's restroom at work and noticed something amusing. No, it doesn't have anything to do with the awkward guy who will go descriptionless (awkward doesn't give you any hints among an office populated by engineers!) who neglected to wash his hans after a visit to the urinal. (Actually happened, by the way.) I noticed something startling about the soap.

Aside form the container being transparent, which lets us see that it is pink, which is only amusing because it kind of makes me feel like I am washing my hands with Pepto-Bismal (what do those words even mean? I'm both a sciencey and wordy guy, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen those roots anywhere else), it has directions on it. Directions. For soap. It would have been ok, had it read something along the lines of:

"Directions: Rinse hands, dispense soap, ha ha, are you really reading this! It's soap! You learn how to use soap before you learn how to read! Even the slow kid in your first grade class knew how to wash his hands!"


But it doesn't. It has real directions. It's absurd! Like on a Dasani water bottle where it says Ingredients: water. Thank you for that. It also has separate instructions for particularly soiled hands (you put the soap on before you rinse your hands in that case). I do like the use of "soiled" in place of dirty, it does add an air of classiness to the plastic, transparent container of industrial soap. The best part, thought, is towards the end when it says "for external use only," just in case someone really does think it's Pepto-Bismal.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, I have been wondering want to do with all that Pepto-Bismol after the surgeon fixed the intestinal problem that was causing me to vomit all over the place. Bismol is clearly from the word Bismuth in Bismuth subsalicylate, but I have no clue on the Pepto part.

Anonymous said...

I saw similar instructions at CU this week. A letter page size in a frame with six illustrated steps on how to wash your hands using liquid soap.

Main Entry: pept-
Variant(s): or pepto-
Function: combining form
: protein fragment or derivative (peptide)
http://medical.merriam-webster.com/medical/pept-

Engineer Sighted said...

Ha ha, maybe I can use you guys to do my research next time I have a newspaper story to write.

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