Germ-o-phobe or clean freak.

I'm not but I see things that make me SMH. 

1. Stayed at Hampton and my "clean" wash cloth wasn't.  Figure the worst thing on it. (Now careful inspection is done at each hotel)

I see a lot of hotels folding the clean laundry and using the breakfast tables.  Makes me wonder......

2. Chick-fil-A throws ketchup packets on top of the fries.  Do we know those packets are clean?

3. I refuse to wear new clothes until they are washed.  My wife laughs.  

You?

I feel like I've outgrown a lot of my "germophobe-ness". 

As a young adult, I wouldn't have considered eating something that another person had taken a bite out of.  I met a friend and his kid for lunch and my friend, who was a big fella, asked his son if he was finished with the remains of his sandwich.  When the kid said he was, my friend proceeded to eat it.  I remember thinking "eeew!"

Some years later, that guy is me.  I routinely finish the half-eaten remnants of fast food leftovers.  Funny how having kids and changing a few thousand diapers puts yucky stuff in perspective.

That said, hotel sheets do kind of give me the heebie-jeebies.  I want the sheets and towels to have a reassuringly strong smell of bleach.

New clothes, with the exception of an off-the-shelf bathing suit, I will wear before washing.

I like to keep my immune system in top-notch condition by bombarding it with all manner of bacteria and virii (viruses?).

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

Nope. Doesn't really bother me. 

I don't wear new clothes until I wash them, but it's not a hygiene issue.

I can't stand the feeling of the sizing they put in new fabrics.  I wash them to soften them up.

Other than that, I'm pretty lax at this point.  If it's obviously dirty, smells bad, or tastes bad, forget it.  But if it seems fresh I don't particularly worry about what it may have touched.

I live pretty much fulltime in hotel rooms these days, so it takes a lot to bother me...  finding someone else's underwear under the sheets after getting into bed - that bothers me.  I made a VERY angry phone call to the front desk and made them change the sheets after that one.

I used to design supermarkets... and spent more time than I want to remember in the bowels of some operating stores doing surveys for renovations. Ketchup packets on top of fries should be the least of your worries.

I agree with your wife on the last one. 

Swmbo is an assistant housekeeping director at Disney. One of the GOOD resorts. She's used to prepping rooms for celebrities and high end execs that stay on property and whatnot. I let her handle the hotel worries. She vets the properties and we go from there. 

As far as clothes, if they pass the smell test, fine by me. I'm probably fixing to get something worse on em than what's already there. 

"Back in the day" when I was an apprentice the shop I was working for had quite a few restaurant / refrigeration accounts in downtown Boston and Cambridge (right across the "Chalhz Rivah")  Because we were more economical labor the apprentices did a lot of that work. 

I remember one of my girlfriends talking about planning to go with some of her friends to a fairly prominent bar at Faneuil Hall Market that we had under contract.  Me: Hey, stick to bottled beer.  Don't get anything with ice in it.  Her: Why?  Me: They just scheduled me to do the maintenance, I'm sure the ice machine is gross.  I'll let you know when I've cleaned it.   

The insides of those things will grow technicolor algae that thrives in cold temps.  Part of the maintenance was to dump the whole bin (probably close to 1,000 pounds of ice) sanitize the ice maker and the bin and then start it back up.  The managers loved me. Not. (Takes a while to fill that bin back up)  I still won't go out to dinner in town, saw too much sketchy E36 M3 in back kitchens and basements of restaurants.

I'm at a hotel this week for work. Hotel pickin's are slim here; it's not a great hotel. I too would prefer that the sheets smell like bleach, but apparently no one else prefers that, so the sheets smell like nothing. Close enough, I guess. The bathroom is well worn but clean enough. I wear shoes, or at least socks 100% of the time in this room, I stay away from the corners, and I don't look under anything.  I frame this experience by remembering the conditions under which I took my kids camping when they were Boy Scouts. I'm in a building that doesn't leak, in the A/C, with fresh sheets and a (mostly) clean bathroom in which everything works. And I'm not sharing it with ten 12 year-olds. That's a very deluxe camping trip.

I'm OK with wearing new clothes without washing them, but I prefer to wash the odor out first for shirts.

When I was a teenager, I worked at a McDonald's. One day the owner (yeah, the owner, not the manager) walked thru the store just after closing with a bottle of bug spray in each hand. After they were empty, he reloaded. Critters crawled out of everywhere. A few days later, the Health Dept shut us down for 3 days. I kept working there and kept eating the food on breaks. I figure most fast food places and most restaurants are like this to varying extents, so I eat out when I need to and just forget about it. Never had a problem (except that one time I had jalapenos on a sub in Ann Arbor - never again).

I'm careful to make sure chicken is fully cooked, and I'm really anal about putting cold foods back in the fridge promptly.

For cars, if it's been left outside for years, I'll only work on it in the winter, when all the biting and stinging stuff isn't active.

A customer of mine worked the Wisconsin State Fair in the early 70's - fried food booth.  He said they shut down the fryer and overnight the flies landed in the grease. 

He told he being the new guy was picking out the dead flies and a coworker yelled at him to stop it and get that thing fired up.  

I also won't look under anything in hotels. 

Datsun310Guy said:

3. I refuse to wear new clothes until they are washed.  My wife laughs.  

Me too, but not because I'm worried about human waste or anything. I'm worried about what sort of chemicals the fabrics are treated with to keep away insects and such.

I often wonder about self-serve buffet lines. 
 

Instead of letting us serve with random utensils, they force us to all touch the same serving utensil that everyone else does (including that dude that didn't wash his hands when he left the bathroom). 
 

Looks like they are trying to concentrate exposure. 

99% of the time I couldn't care less.

Lunch with greasy hands, no problem.

Shoveling out a septic tank, BTDT. Sat down in the middle of that for lunch. 

Hair in restaurant food. So what. Pull it out and keep eating. 

Drop a fork on the floor, wipe it off and keep eating. 

A dirty glass, on the other hand, is one of my pet peves. Not from a germ standpoint but because the person emptying the machine didn't do their job. 

I also really hate other people's feet. 

Lastly, if you feel bad, stay the F away from me. 

I do wash new clothes but more for comfort than worry about germs or chemicals. 

I have slept in some nasty places .

I have a cast iron gut.

I no longer have any berks.

Toyman! said:

99% of the time I couldn't care less.

Lunch with greasy hands, no problem.

Shoveling out a septic tank, BTDT. Sat down in the middle of that for lunch. 

Hair in restaurant food. So what. Pull it out and keep eating. 

Drop a fork on the floor, wipe it off and keep eating. 

That's pretty much me, including the septic tank. You know you can pay people to do that, everybody told me. I never thought of that. 
Nothing cleans your dirty wrenching hands better than the grease from a Wendy's hamburger. 
I just spent the week in northern Ontario helping my buddy gut his near 100 year old cottage in preparation for renovation. 
I've never seen so much mice poop and damp stinky wood in my life. It was just the two of us, not a lot of soap or running water, and I did most of the cooking. We survived. 
I could have jumped in the lake but I didn't. But it sure was nice to have a hot shower when I got home. 
PW freaks if I wash fruits or veggies with the cistern water. But that's the water we clean the dishes with. 
I know but they're dry. 
What?

Germ-o-phobe. I don't care if things are messy or dirty, I just want things sterile.

I am amazed at some of the places I used to stay the night when I traveled.  I hated H.I. because they screwed me out of a ton of points years ago that could have gotten me a nice one week vacation stay for free.   The next year they changed to rules to where it wasn't worth it.  Most of the places I stayed were the mom and pop places in small towns, back before they were all acquired by a Patel.  

One night my boss and I stayed at a motel in Marianna, Fl that was so bad my boss went out and slept in his truck.  

Nowadays I like to stay in much better places that cost $$$ and get pretty critical about its cleanliness.  I always check for bed bugs.  

And I used to have all my clothes washed first because of he chemical smell in them.  It isn't nearly as bad as it once was.  

Just depends. I never use a straw at a restaurant, I can tell the difference between a water spot and dried on food on utensils, etc. I suspect this is why I very rarely get sick.

The one thing I ALWAYS do though, if I use a public restroom......if the water isn't on an automatic sensor, I turn the water on then get soap and thoroughly wash my hands. The water stays running as I use paper towels to dry my hands. Paper towels stay between my hand and the faucet to turn off the water, then between my hand and the door knob/handle to open. Then hold the door open with my foot and toss the paper towel in the trash. 

There is a guy I work with, when we still went into the office, I can't tell you how many times I saw him come out of a stall and walk straight back into the office without washing his hands which is so incredibly disgusting to me. On days we had lunch delivered, if he got to the food before me, I didn't eat lunch that day.

I’ll just come out and say it: Shaking hands is gross. 

In reply to Toyman! :

Excellent answer! Hey, you have to have a few germs in your body, don't you? 

A few years back I had a hospital stay, and for a short time they put me in the same room as some other guy who had a flesh eating virus.  That cloth curtain between the beds didn't seem like nearly enough protection...

Not even a little.  I usually won't eat something that someone else has bitten off of unless it looks really good.  But if you offer me a sip of your drink it's basically a guarantee that I'll give it a try.  Otherwise, I'll touch any doorknob, shake any hand, sleep in any bed, pet any dog.