Spare a Square: Public Restroom Survival Kit Kills Germs for Under 15 Bucks

By Jeff Balke Fri., Aug. 20 2010 at 2:00 PM

Categories: Whatever

If you have this kit, you CAN spare a square.

When I was only a teenager, I went on a trip with my parents and one of the stops was in Ephesus, Turkey. As I was strolling the what some consider holy grounds, I felt the need to, you know, use the little boy's room.

I located a restroom and made my way inside only to find that the facilities consisted of a wall with the floor below it slanted toward a drain for a urinal - oddly like the old Astrodome bathrooms - and a series of rather small holes in the floor with footprints embedded in the concrete next to each of them demonstrating where you put your feet when you use this "toilet."

Needless to say, if I had the Public Restroom Survival Kit, well, I still would have been stuck with a hole in the ground for a toilet, but I would have had germ-free toilet paper!

The kit includes the following:

Charmin® To Go Bathroom Tissue package
Charmin® To Go Toilet Seat Covers package
Charmin To Go® Fresh Mates Cloths Clorox Disinfecting Wipes To Go Pack - Fresh Scent
Lysol® Disinfectant Spray - Crisp Linen® scent
Purell® Aloe Hand Sanitizer (2oz)
Safe2Touch - On-The-Go Surface Cleaner
(2) disposable Nitrile Gloves (powder free - size large)

If you are a germaphobe, you might want to buy a few hundred of these for your next trip to the gym or your favorite restaurant or your church. If you frequent airport bathrooms or Memorial Park, I'd just suggest stocking up on these as well, though you might want to include a condom or two with it, you know, just in case.

In fact, iff you are so concerned about such things, you are probably thinking to yourself right now, "God, I wish I'd had these kits for Y2K or H1N1. For only $15, I can fill up my whole bunker and be safe when the zombie apocalypse happens right after the Mayan disaster in 2012."

For the rest of us, the toilet paper - why do we insist on calling it bathroom tissue? - toilet seat covers, hand sanitizer and even the disinfecting wipes (ew!), in the Fresh Scent no less, make some degree of sense, but I can't seem to wrap my head around the other items.

Most of us would like a neat public bathroom, but I'm not going to bust out the disinfectant spray and surface cleaner at, for example, Numbers, and start wiping the place down. Nothing could remove the years of stains of varying origin delivered by goth kids and hipsters in there anyway. But, even if they could be removed with teeny tiny bottles of germ killer, what am I, a janitor?

But, most importantly, what in God's name are powder free (POWDER FREE!) nitrile gloves doing in there? I'm pretty sure those fit neatly into the BDSM Survival Kit or the Pretend You're a Proctologist Survival Kit, but does it really have a place alongside toilet paper and hand sanitizer (which seems irrelevant if you use the gloves) in the bathroom?

You know what, don't answer that.

Imagine the look on someone's face if I whipped out a pair of rubber gloves and snapped them into place right before setting up at the urinal beside them. Hopefully, that look would not include a knowing grin or my survival kit might require a few other supplies like nunchucks or a light saber.