Ride The Snot Rocket

Growing up I remember my mom always seemed to have the sniffles. She would use and reuse a kleenex to the point where it no longer looked like a tissue, but rather an owl pellet (you know the kind that contain mouse skeletons? Yeah, those). Anyway, I remember her drinking her cup of International Coffee (Suisse Mocha flavour) and dabbing her nose while she prepared our lunches. When not wiping, she would store the kleenex in the cuff of her navy blue housecoat. Let me be clear, she didn’t use a hanky, she used a disposable facial tissue more times in a row than its creators ever intended for it. She was recycling before it became trendy!

Now my grandfather, he used a real mccoy handkerchief. In fact, he had a vast array. He was a debonair man in white polyester slacks and tinted glasses and he loved a pop of colour peeking out of the breast pocket of his pale pink polo. Plus his honker dripped like a spigot, so it was quite pragmatic to carry one on his person.

You may be wondering what on earth my meandering over these childhood memories of my family members has to do with public transit. I’m getting there. You see, I am completely compassionate when it comes to runny noses. I come from a long line of nasal issues, but I will not stand for blowing one’s nose on a packed streetcar.

Its cold and flu season, H1N1 is in full tilt, HELLO?! So for the love of all things holy, keep your globules to yourself! Feel a drip coming on? Sniff it back, honey! Have you ever seen that horrifying slow motion close up of a man sneezing behind a black backdrop and the camera zooms in on each droplet of germ-ridden saliva and mucous that shoots out of his facial orifices? This is what goes through my mind every time I hear an “Achoo!” on the TTC.

What makes this worry a gruesome reality is that I’ve witnessed with my own eyes on more than one occasion, a person completely ignore Public Health’s helpful advice to do the “Sleeve Sneeze” and instead choose to hock a big, pale yellow loogie right onto the palm of their mitt. What did they do with said mitt? Why they held on to the hand rail, that’s what! And I swear I saw a string of mucous stretch between the red woolen fabric of the assailant’s mitt and the aluminum pole. I will throw a parade the day that Purell is made available on public transit.