Dip all your money in the toilet.

( I read over this before posting. Best put your drink down, there are things that might cause keyboard damage in here. I nearly did myself and I already knew what was coming)

Some months ago, there was a swearage problem in Local Shop. It was actually a sewerage problem but it did result in some severe swearage.

It started at the end of my shift that day. The next guy had just taken over. I like to leave things safe so had made sure the public toilets were well stocked with arsepaper and hand towels. Well, Next Guy went off to check the bogs while I got ready to leave. He came back and said there were no hand towels in the gents.

Now, those dispensers in there hold three full packs of hand towels and when filled, do not run out in twenty minutes even if the Big Hand Society all get the squits at once. Anyway, it was time for me to leave so I assured him I had filled the dispensers and set off to buy whisky.

The mystery was solved shortly afterwards. We had been visited by an OCD handwasher who, instead of putting hand towels in the bin immediately below the dispenser, had flushed them all. He was later caught and told never to darken our urinals again, but I wasn’t present for that part.

The bogs are often stuffed with arsepaper, usually shortly after 4 pm when the schools let their virulent disease-ridden charges loose, but that is a temporary problem. Arsepaper is designed to fall apart when wet so all you have to do is wait a while and it will disintegrate. Hand towel paper is not designed to fall apart when wet, it is needed for more than one wipe. It sets into a cellulose plug some way down the pipe, especially when three full packs go down there at once.

(Incidentally, if I ever open a shop of my own, there will be a shelf labelled ‘arsepaper’)

So the drains backed up most severely and there was, not to put too fine a point on it, shit everywhere. More than we are paid to deal with by a long chalk. I found out next day that they had to call in Drain Man with his very thick rubber gloves and industrial strength nose pegs.

The problem was swiftly solved but it did close the cafe for that evening (you cannot have a cafe if you can’t provide toilets, and ours were in the state where if you sat on them and flushed, they would ram more up than you had put down).

Even so, this kind of event is rare. I have not, in 18 months, found a real bog body although I did once find a drunk asleep with his trousers round his ankles on the disabled toilet. He had been asleep in there for so long that the auto-light had gone out and that lasts almost an hour. I thought I’d found a dead one and when he woke, I wished he had been. A more gitty git from the gittiest part of Gitland would be hard to imagine.

Then there was the porn star in the ladies. She must have been. She had left us one of the Unflushables and if she can get something that wide and long out in one go, she must surely have been in a lot of those films. As my father would definitely have said in the recent non-PC past, it was like a black man’s dick. For those who want to be offended, you might want to consider that any man of any colour would not be at all offended if his dick was compared to something that big. There are horses who would be flattered. That woman’s arse is probably listed in some caver’s almanac somewhere and there might well be a few guys with torches on their heads still lost in there.

I digress (surprise!)

Back to talking toilet. Ours are sprayed with disinfectant every hour, as are the taps, door handles and pretty much anything you are likely to touch in there. Nobody ever catches anything in Local Shop toilets. Nobody. Ever. We don’t need no litigation. Oo, there’s a song in there somewhere.

So it is no surprise to find that, once again, the Daily Crap has found something that is dirtier than a toilet seat. Our Local Shop ones are as close to sterile as it is possible to get wirthout burning them. You will find more bacteria on the ceiling than you will on the toilet seat, because I can’t reach the ceiling.

What they have found this time is… money. Filthy lucre. It’s disgusting, it is covered in bacteria and much of it has been handled by smokers. I am still, as a public service, labelling mine as such.

The Mail is shocked that we do not wash our hands after handling money. We wash our hands after shitting, so why not after handling money? It might have something to do with the natural proximity of a sink to a toilet, whereas it is rare to find hand washing facilities at the tills. This is something that I must convince all shops to urgently address.

It might also have something to do with the fact that while there are more bacteria on any bit of money than on a toilet seat, there are more on your fingers than on the money so the actual level of risk is below zero.

It is all just to drum up support for the new plastic money. I don’t care what money is made of as long as I can buy whisky with it. How disease-ridden it is has no relevance when you are handing it to someone else. Nothing grows in whisky so you’d be trading something potentially deadly for something totally safe. I see no  problem here.

What is the big deal with plastic money anyway? I remember pound notes – hell, I remember ten shilling notes – and when they became coins nobody cared. They were still worth a lot less than they used to be anyway, might as well make them out of plastic too.

The Germ Terror will also hasten contactless payment and the eventual implanted chips. Those new plastic notes will not be germ free, in fact as they will be handled often they are certain to have more bacteria than a toilet seat, which, in the Houses of the Normal, is rarely handled at all.

Toilet seats, properly cared for as in wiped down and kept looking clean are probably the least contaminated things you will find in daily life. Everything has more bacteria on it than a toilet seat, including the buttocks it supports. The ones the buttocks leave behind the behind won’t last long on dry plastic.

Somewhere down the line, and not too far in the future, we are going to see the wonderful headline ‘Money costs the NHS money!’

Several drone brains will explode trying to take this in. I only hope I get to see one.