I’ve never been especially germ-phobic; when you grow up sharing a bathroom with four siblings you learn to take germs, bacteria and the occasional pathogen in stride. With 5 kids sharing one toilet it could have been pretty nasty, but my mother was a clean freak who managed her house with a terrifying German efficiency and our bathroom was pristine. I never really thought about germs.
Similarly, after a recent meeting in Detroit I was too exhausted to think about germs; I was thinking about taking a nap before dinner. I went up to my hotel room and out of habit, I got some ice, poured a Diet Coke, took off my shoes and socks and turned on the TV. Next thing I knew, my world came crashing down around me: I had inadvertently found a special report with the lurid title, “What’s REALLY lurking in your hotel room?” It was subtitled: “You REALLY don’t want to know.” As it turned out, I really didn’t.
The object of the newscast was to show that even “upscale” hotels are as filthy as the slums of Mumbai. First the producers turned on a black light in a hotel room; this light is specially designed to locate what they referred to, delicately, as “secretions” on the carpet. This revealed that there was not a square inch of carpeting that was secretion free. The narrator, a woman who spoke with an urgency usually associated with an impending terrorist attack, claimed that walking barefoot in a hotel room was “suicide.” I looked down and saw with horror that I was barefoot. Hastily, I put my socks back on.
Next the producers turned the black light on the bedspread, which was a veritable petri dish of DNA. “If you value your health you will never sit on a hotel bedspread,” the narrator intoned darkly, casually discussing tuberculosis and cholera and ebola. Nervously I stood up and sipped my Diet Coke.
After this, they showed hidden-camera video showing a hotel maid cleaning out the drinking glasses with the same rag she used to wipe the toilet. Slightly nauseated I dropped my Diet Coke just in time to hear about hotel guests who soak their false teeth (and worse) in the hotel ice bucket.
By now I had broken out in a cold sweat; as I grabbed a towel to wipe my forehead I learned that hotel maids will often refold used towels and put them back on the shelf for the next guest. I also learned that my assumption that my sheets were changed after the previous guest checked out was, at best, naïve.
Over the next half-hour I learned not to touch the remote control, the doorknob, the snooze button on the alarm clock or the phone. I was strongly advised not to shower naked. I heard about bedbugs and dust mites. I learned that if I wanted to maintain my good health I should travel with my own bed linens, towels, and glassware.
Feeling queasy, I got ready for bed wondering how I could possibly sleep in such a pestilential environment. Unsurprisingly, I did not sleep well and early the next morning when the alarm went off for a 7 AM flight I felt like I had never slept, but I resolved to nap on the plane.
An hour later I was safely on the plane, and, no thanks to a surly flight attendant, I had managed to snag a pillow. As I made myself comfortable I played with the plane’s in-seat entertainment system to find something to watch and found a program on the hazards of air travel. “What’s REALLY on that airplane pillow?” asked the announcer.