[WEB4LIB] RE: Headphones -- revisited

[Daniel Messer]

Good morning/afternoon/evening all!

Before I start here, I want everyone reading this to know not to take it 
personally, this is just something I'm very passionate about and since 
someone threw in their two cents, y'all are going to get my buck fifty. :) 
And just so you know, this is going to be a long one. Sorry for the bandwidth.

Phalbe Henriksen <phenriksen at earthlink.net> said:

> Cleaning the headphones 
> between each use can get quite expensive, not to mention time consuming. 
> The ultimate in cleanliness, though. I know of one library where they give 
> the alcohol wipe to the patron and it's up to 'im/'er to clean the 
> headphones. IIRC, this saves on the cost of the wipes, as people who don't 
> use them leave them on the table.

I find it extremely humourous that we've become a country so obsessed with 
cleanliness that we actually take time to wipe off headphones, sanitize 
telephones, disinfect doorknobs, and Lysol the living heck out of almost 
anything the public touches. What people don't seem to realize is how big a 
waste of time and money most of it is.

I've worked with and for the public for several years. I've used the same 
telephones as them, shared the same headphones, turned the same doorknobs, 
and so forth. But I don't go through any special need to wipe off and 
disinfect every little thing that they use. I don't rub alcohol on the 
telephone, I don't Pine Sol the knobs, and I almost certainly don't use 
Lysol. I think the fumes from that product are more harmful than the bacteria 
you're supposedly killing. And most of them advertise as killing only 99% of 
the germs anyway. Folks, statistics say that there are millions of germs on 
that telephone. So let's be conservative and say one million germs are there. 
Killing 99 percent leaves 10,000 germs left on that phone. I would think that 
10,000 can make you just as sick as the one million could. As a matter of 
fact, they can make you sicker, because after all, those 10,000 belong to a 
strain that is RESISTANT to disinfection. Yet I don't get sick. I don't get 
colds, I don't get stomach flu, and I don't get strep throat. I get sick once 
a year and it's usually due to something I ate that wasn't cooked properly.

Science has shown that Americans are getting sick more often and many 
scientists are blaming it on disinfectants, antibiotics, and anti-bacterial 
products such as Dial soap. Our immune systems need practice, folks. They 
need germs to kill so we can become resistant to those bugs. Anyone been 
reading the news that there's new "superviruses" that are immune to normal 
methods of disinfection. Anyone know why? Because evolution made them that 
way, the strongest viruses have been artificially selected by us humans 
because we killed off the weaker varieties.
 
> What we do is a compromise. We keep the headphones on the computer tables, 
> sort of pushed to the back. Therefore, whatever we do, we start out with in 
> the morning. And that is to wrap each earpiece in the cheapest sandwich bag 
> we can buy. ('m not sure I can describe how we do this so securely that 
> little children can't pull them off, but if anyone's interested, I'll try 
> to write it up.)
> 
> If a patron asks, we change the sandwich bag, so they get a clean one. Very 
> few people ask.

The cheapest sandwich bag you can buy? Think about what was just said there. 
You've gone to a store of some kind, and bought a sandwich bag as a 
sterilization and sanitization device. Not only that, you bought the cheap 
one. One that came from god knows where, but probably not your state, and 
brought with it whatever germs the worker who made it was carrying or 
whatever germs happened to be on the machine that manufactured it. It's not a 
sterile sandwich bag so once again you've not elimintated the germs, but 
merely decreased their levels. In the act of putting the sandwich bag on the 
headphones you've passed along whatever germs you had on you at the time you 
grabbed the sandwich bag. And here's another question, did you wash you hands 
after taking the old sandwich bag off and before you put the new one on? If 
not, you've totally defeated your purpose because you've passed on some of 
the germs on the old bad to the new one. 

> 
> We also wipe the earpieces with rubbing alcohol occasionally. One of our 
> circ clerks is a cleanliness freak and this is just fodder for her 
> obsession. Works for us.

Ocassionally is just fine in my book, maybe once a day or so. Don't get me 
wrong, if some disgusting old drunkie who hasn't bathed in six days sits down 
at a table and uses some headphones, I'm not only up for sanitizing them, but 
I'd recommend burning the suckers. However, this doesn't happen too often 
here and I've never heard of it happening too often other places either.
 
> As for the headphones themselves, of the eight we received, seven have been 
> broken. They're nice headphones. Too nice. We buy the ones in the library 
> catalogs made for rough school use to replace these nice ones.
> 

Ditto from Yakima. Ours don't break too often, but boy oh boy aren't they 
nice and don't they just seem to grow legs and walk out of the library? Our 
method of fixing the problem was to buy cheap headphones and mark them as 
disposable. Sure sure, they don't give out the quality of sound that the 
other ones do, but patrons are more than welcome to bring their own 
headphones if they're after sound quality. If they break, we toss them. And 
we haven't had a problem with people stealing them simply because they're not 
worth it. I can get you brand name and price if you're interested. Oh and 
they have don't have the large plastic earpiece. They're the ones with the 
little foam earpieces.

Once again, no disrespect of ANYONE intended, this is just something I've 
been POed about for a couple of years now. So please, don't take anything the 
man in the Hawai'ian shirt shirt says personally!

Regards to all!
Dan

> Phalbe Henriksen
> Director
> Bradford County Public Library
> Starke, FL
> 
> "Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American
> civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the
> other." -- Louis Stanley Jast
 
And god bless Louis Stanely Jast too. I'm a big fan of good books and good 
booze! :)

-- 
Mondai wa
The subject in question...
-------------
Daniel Messer
Technologies Instructor
Yakima Valley Regional Library
dmesser at yvrls.lib.wa.us
509-452-8541 ext 712
102 N 3rd St  Yakima, WA  98901
-----------
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
                                         -Hunter S. Thompson