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One picks up strange stories during travel. One even picks up germs-or rather stories about germs. As I did in the US a few months ago.(Panic not! I don't mean the swine flu…)
I heard this lively discussion on a local US channel, where an expert told us: it is wrong to make beds immediately after waking up! Apparently, the germs arising from one's body sweat at night were still mingling with the sheets and pillows, and it was better to just leave them be for a while-till the fresh morning air made them disappear.
While that's great news for every lazy bachelor-pad inhabitant (why make beds when I'm coming right back here to sleep by day's end?); I must say we exclaimed: "Whatever will these germophobic Americans come up with next!"
Well, I'll tell you what they came up with next. A chap called Simon Sassoon (yes, a relative of that hair chap Vidal ) was pretty worried seeing his girlfriend touching the door handle of a hotel's rest room during a date (eek, what if she tries to hold hands now…) and suddenly thought of an invention called the HYSO.
It's a small white plastic box on rest room doors that frequently gushes out a fine dry disinfecting mist killing all germs on the door knob below. His girlfriend is now an ex (maybe he handed her surgical gloves to wear for the rest of the date, making her mad,) but young Sassoon has made his millions with his clever invention.
So too the guy who invented the personal portable hand strap to hook on for those sweaty bus commutes. Or the lady who invented Sani-shopping, a snap-on plastic cover for shopping trolleys.
While we may have laughed at this in the past, suddenly the swine flu panic is making all these inventions make terrific sense. And despite suspicions of the origin and spread of swine flu, the US has the world's largest number of germ-fearing compulsive obsessive disordered people in the world.
And what do you say about this: there's a story of this American-so conscious of germs, that he even refuses to travel to Germ-any…
This article was featured on http://www.idiva.com/opinion-entertainment/look-what-i-picked-up-on-my-travels/2078
