A Gigantic Germ (Part 2)
October 18th 2006 02:02
Everyone knows how unappetising food is on planes. It looks and tastes like it should belong in a lavatory rather than on your meal tray. But never mind all that. Plane food is a haven for germs. How do you test whether food is hot enough when you’re cooking at home? Poke your finger in it perhaps? If the foil cover on your beef tenderloins and roast vegetables appears as though it has been peeled open and then resealed, chances are, your meal has been used by hosties for the finger poke temperature test.
Worse, I have seen hosties create a “new” dish with other passengers’ leftovers, to appease an irate passenger demanding his original meal choice. I played no part in this despicable act, but shamefully I confess to serving bread rolls which have bounced across the aircraft floor as I yanked meal trays out of a cart. Surprisingly, my retrieval of bouncing bread rolls had always escaped the attention of passengers. Stealth is a dubious talent of the hostie.
Think about the confined space in an aeroplane that you are sharing with hundreds of other people. Many of them so inconsiderate they travel when they have contagious illnesses. The passenger next to you is probably having a sneezing fit. The person in front is coughing and spluttering. The parent behind is admonishing their child for scratching chicken-poxed skin. It’s a miracle if you walk out of an aeroplane the same healthy person you were before you the entered the germ zone.
To this day I still can’t get over passengers treating the interior of an aeroplane like some kind of open dumping ground. Passengers have no qualms whatsoever in littering food scraps, food wrappers, magazines, newspapers, tissues and nappies all over the floor. A former colleague told me that on a recent flight idiotic parents allowed their baby to leave a trail of poo along the aisle. That is pretty extreme but I’m not exaggerating when I say that at the end of some flights the cabin resembled a war zone.
Being a self-diagnosed germaphobe myself, after years of working on a gigantic germ the road to recovery promises to be a very long one. Therefore, I don’t foresee any visits to the source of my trauma in the near future. But if you insist on travelling on an aeroplane my advice is to refuse all food- and hot towels that the hosties offer, drink only sealed bottles of water, use the bathroom only in cases of severe emergency and bathe yourself in Dettol when you get home!
Worse, I have seen hosties create a “new” dish with other passengers’ leftovers, to appease an irate passenger demanding his original meal choice. I played no part in this despicable act, but shamefully I confess to serving bread rolls which have bounced across the aircraft floor as I yanked meal trays out of a cart. Surprisingly, my retrieval of bouncing bread rolls had always escaped the attention of passengers. Stealth is a dubious talent of the hostie.
Think about the confined space in an aeroplane that you are sharing with hundreds of other people. Many of them so inconsiderate they travel when they have contagious illnesses. The passenger next to you is probably having a sneezing fit. The person in front is coughing and spluttering. The parent behind is admonishing their child for scratching chicken-poxed skin. It’s a miracle if you walk out of an aeroplane the same healthy person you were before you the entered the germ zone.
To this day I still can’t get over passengers treating the interior of an aeroplane like some kind of open dumping ground. Passengers have no qualms whatsoever in littering food scraps, food wrappers, magazines, newspapers, tissues and nappies all over the floor. A former colleague told me that on a recent flight idiotic parents allowed their baby to leave a trail of poo along the aisle. That is pretty extreme but I’m not exaggerating when I say that at the end of some flights the cabin resembled a war zone.
Being a self-diagnosed germaphobe myself, after years of working on a gigantic germ the road to recovery promises to be a very long one. Therefore, I don’t foresee any visits to the source of my trauma in the near future. But if you insist on travelling on an aeroplane my advice is to refuse all food- and hot towels that the hosties offer, drink only sealed bottles of water, use the bathroom only in cases of severe emergency and bathe yourself in Dettol when you get home!
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