The other day when I was going into work--actually, this was Valentine's because I remember all the flowers around--I was looking around idly, as you do, when I saw a guy clearly preparing himself to meet his date. He was doing the shirt-smoothing, hair-fiddling thing people do when they are about to get off and meet someone on the platform. Noticing he had a packet of flowers with him, I sort of smiled to see him all excited for a date. Until...

He spat into his hands and spit-washed his face.

Okay, now, listen--I have a grandmother just like anyone else. I have suffered through the indignity of having her lick her finger to wipe some spot off my face just the same as every other kid in the world. I've enjoyed all the various permutations of the spit-wash--the spit on a tissue and wipe, the lick the finger and wipe, and even the gawd-forsaken finger-stuck-in-MY-mouth before they wiped my face. I'm down with the fact that when a kid has something sticky or smudgy on their face and you don't have good wipes to hand, something has to give.

But when did ADULTS start washing their faces with spit? Seriously, I don't mean that he licked a finger to get a single spot off, I mean he literally spat fully into each hand, wiped them together, and then rubbed his entire face briskly up and down. Is this more normal than I had previously thought?

This is the more normal way of doing it. Notice the lack of spit.

I was still pondering this occurrence when I headed into a meeting. There were only four of us there, so quite an intimate meeting, but it was very official--we weren't all chums or anything--in fact, no one in the room had met every other person before. We were a convergance of services being represented, so there was a lot of business speak of what 'resources' we brought to the table and the various 'challenges' that were prohibiting our ability to 'work cohesively' across our respective areas.

We had gotten through the introductions and just gotten down to business when one of the people at the meeting pulled out her cell phone and started to text like her fingers were on fire.

I figured, okay, she just needed to send off a quick "In a meeting for an hour, back to you soon" sort of thing. But...no. She never put the phone down. Long texts, multiples texts, I have no idea what she was sending, all I know is there were at least two people in that room who didn't know where to look.

I really need some sort of shorthand way to approach someone and say, "Excuse me, but you're not keeping to the social contract. Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter." Or I need to start working from home, never changing out of my jam jams or eating anything that doesn't come in a tube. Because sometimes people weird me out.