Spit Paper
I’m not so sure I like spit paper. Spit paper is my made up word but you’re probably familiar with it and you might even make it from time to time yourself. You know how when you’re turning pages or leafing through a stack of papers and your fingers are dry and you can’t get a grip on the paper so you lick your fingers to help get some purchase on the paper? That’s spit paper.
I’m relatively sure I don’t like spit paper.
Someone came to see me this morning and he brought with him a fomite. I like the word fomite. A fomite is an inanimate object that can transmit germs which means a fomite is another word for pretty much everything in the world. You’re better off not using the word fomite in public, especially during a doctor visit, but it’s still a fun word to know. Anyway, this person started leafing through his fomite which was a small stack of paper. Like my example above, his fingers were dry so he wet them by licking them. And he didn’t just make a discrete lubricating tongue touch, he licked his finger like he was going after a melting ice cream cone and he was so aggressive with his licking the lick was almost audible. And worse than that, he finger licked more than once. Eventually – and I’m guessing with wrinkly, waterlogged fingertips – he finds what he wants to find and he shows me what he wants to show me and then he tries to hand me the germ-infested fomite… errr… I mean papers. Yeah, right, like I’m going take those!
Always alert to possible contamination by disease-causing microbes, and having recently recovered from just such an infection, I pointed to the desktop. “Just set it there,” I said. “And I’ll take care of it.”
It’s 10:15 a.m. right now and this took place about an hour ago and the fomite, I mean the spit papers, I mean the papers, are still sitting there.
I really don’t like spit paper.
Michael B. Fishman
Michaelsfishbowl 
Hi Michael!! As always your blogs are interesting and usually incorporate an idea that we are all familiar with but never really think about!! This is another good example of that–keep them coming!!! By the way–how do I go about feeding your fish LOL?!
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Carole, just put your cursor in the little blue box and click and that will drop down some food for the fish!
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hehe, so glad I am not the only one that think that is yucky! I don’t like shaking hands either or kissing strangers. Actually, there’s too many to mention. LOL!
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Maybe too many to mention, but not too many to think about!
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I love your germophobe musings Michael and what you described is the main reason I buy my own books (or download Kindle books) instead of checking out library books. When I think of all the places those books have been (assuming to the bathroom with some people who think of the bathroom as their personal reading room) and all the possible germs on all those fingers that have passed over those pages before me I cannot even think about reading one of them!
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Great minds think alike! And then wasn’t there a story last year about a library book in Pittsburgh(?) that they found a bedbug in?
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HAHAHAHA! One of my other blogging friends was just talking about how she found a brown smudge on a page of a library book and, as much as she tried to imagine it was chocolate, she had to skip the page entirely while hoping it wasn’t critical to the plot.
Also, I am now obsessed with feeding your fish.
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There are too many “things” on library book pages to think about without bringing on dizziness and blinding headaches! I used to like back in school when people would leave notes in the margins of books, but the time have a’changed!
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