Stoner's Swine Flu Troubles

The building I work in has a sort-of pseudo-Flatiron Building or flying-V design -- blunted, so it's not an actual triangle -- with two wings per floor. On most floors, there's a set of bathrooms in each wing, but, on my floor, because of the location of the main server room, there is only one set of bathrooms.

So: for starters, the men's bathroom I use at work every day has twice the traffic, more or less, of most other men's rooms in the building...Agreed?

Additionally, the floor I work on is home to technical support and to mainframe programming, two departments where the men outnumber the women by, oh, about 8 to 1, making the percentage of male employees on my one-bathroom floor significantly higher than the percentage of male employees on most two-bathroom floors...

Furthermore, the average age of a male employee on my floor is...somewhat older than you and me, which puts a significant number of these men at a weary-bladdered fifty-plus years of age, increasing the bathroom traffic yet again...

And: apparently, one day, sometime in the past, one of these men witnessed another man use the bathroom and exit without washing his hands! News of this event must have spread through the entire fifty-plus-year old male population, because none of these men will now touch any part of the egress door on their way in or out of the bathroom with their bare hands, but only by prizing the door open with a hand wrapped in (used) paper towel, then blocking it open with their foot while they move, crab-wise, through the afforded opening.

But: these men are not thoughtless. If they sense your presence behind them, they will catch the door -- almost inevitably, with both elbows, like Bill Murray in What About Bob? -- to give you time to parrot their foot-blocking move and achieve your own egress, without, you know, being forced to touch the accursed, germ-ridden door with your own hand.

All of which, of course, makes time slow to a crawl whenever one needs to make a trip to the bathroom, and makes the already-heightened traffic seem even thicker...

And now: now that Swine Flu is here (well, in the States, that is), these fellows will not even touch that door with their (used) paper towel.

Needing to use the bathroom, they now hover outside of it, wait for someone else to make the door open, then lunge into the open space, looking crazier than squirrels crossing a busy avenue....

I can't understand the rationale behind trying to protect yourself from harm by acting in ways that make your fellow humans want to inflict violence on you.