My employer is kind enough to provide covered bicycle parking, lockers, and showers in my building. This helps allow me to ride my bicycle to work everyday, in spite of the terrible Atlanta traffic. There is only one shower, so I am even able to have the room to myself as I clean up after sweating in the southern city heat. When I go home, I grab my gear out of my locker, change, and head out. The whole process only takes a few minutes, and it is really a quite pleasant way to start and end my day. This is not to mention the fact that it fits nicely with my transportation planning ideals of keeping one less car on the road, polluting less, causing less congestion, getting more physical activity, etc.
Now that my blah blah pitch is out of the way, I want to get to my issue at hand. On the wall in the shower is a dispenser for shampoo. There is also a little soap dish, where there sits what appears to be a bar of Irish Spring. I use the public shampoo and a conditioner that I brought in to wash my hair. However, I have a dilemma about what to use to wash my body. I don't really like using shampoo for anything but my hair, so my alternatives are using the bar of soap or bringing in my own soap, either a bar or bottle of body wash.
My instinct is to say "there's a bar of soap in this shower, I should use it" just as I would use the bar of soap in my family shower. However, there is something a little weird about the fact that I don't know who else is using this soap. What if some dude with a gross disease on his back (or worse places) is rubbing it all over himself when I'm not there? What if it drops on the floor? Luckily, the shower is cleaned everyday, and I am usually the first person in each morning, but what if this wasn't the case? I know proper soap etiquette (lather my hands first and then rub them on my body) but what if someone else who uses the shower doesn't? Plus, even if everyone does use proper technique, does that really make the soap clean? I want to believe that the soap cleanses all bacteria and disease just by rubbing on it, like the genie of hygiene, but is that really true?
Now, I tend to be pretty lax about this stuff in general, which is the main reason I am questioning it. Today, in the middle of my shower, I began to wonder if it is actually not a public bar of soap at all, but rather a private bar, and someone has simply claimed squatters' rights on the soap dish. Am I violating this person's right to have his own bar of soap that no one else uses? That person would be an idiot if that was the case, but it is still possible. I wonder what my slightly hypochondriacal blogmate would think about this... or anyone else reading this.
Am I gross for using this bar of soap? Please, give me some perspective.
