Germaphobes (and others): a question for you!

Not a germophobe so just answering because, well, that scenario boggles my mind   How do you get through day to day life with that level of fear over things that other people touch? Truly....how does your day go if you won't touch things that other people do? So my answer is yes, I do 

How are you risking your life if you washed it? As long as you dried it on a sparkling clean, only used once tea towel then I'd say you're good!

We have plasticware at work, so it doesn't really come up, however, there are two people whose hygiene is not the best, so if we had shared cutlery, I'm not sure I could do it. In a pinch, if I washed it, I'd probably manage.

Yes.. In fact I am the one who supplied it. And, amazingly, I rarely got sick with even a cold. A teacer's immune system gets lots of exercise!!

This isn't under the germaphobe category for me...it's just under "things I'd rather not do".
I don't think I am going to get the plague or anything from the people I work with, but given a choice, I'd rather not share their spit!
I can't tell you the times I have seen people drink out of a cup or glass or use a spoon, and give it a quick swipe under cold water and put it in the drying rack. They don't even wash where their lips touched it. Or the number of times I used to get a cup out and there would be a full lipstick print on the rim.
That's fine in your own home and people you are intimate with, but I don't want to put my lips on something where some stranger's have just been.
So I always have my own coffee cup at work, I drink out of it, wash it at the end if the day and put it back in my locker or desk at work.

Cutlery I would always wash before I use it, but we have the magical vanishing cutlery at work, so if I come to work with soup for lunch, chances are there will only be a knife to eat it with. So yes, I now also have my own spoon, knife and fork, but mainly out of necessity.

If I have to share, I will always wash it myself first...but as I said above, it's not because I'm scared of catching something, I just think it's a bit gross to share spit with different strangers every day.

I work with all men who are fine with the swish with cold water and use method so I have a stash of plastic silverware. If there was any semblance of cleanliness I'd be fine with shared cutlery.

So she ( your friend) obviously steam cleans and steralizes her desk drawer each day? You can bet your last dollar there are germs and all kinds of nasty things in an office desk drawer!

I share cutlery at work but even from the drawer I wash it first. Like others on here, I have seen people just rinse them under a cold tap, dry and return them to the drawer. But I'm certainly not germaphobic generally.

Restaurant cutlery goes through a high temp dishwasher or chemical sanitizer - the shared cutlery at my office is lucky to get more than a cursory rinse in lukewarm water.

I'll use it, but would rather wash it first.

PS - I don't sanitize everything every day, but I do wipe down my desk, phone, keyboard, and chair every day and it's usually only my hands rummaging around in my desk drawers so I don't have cause to feel like other people's mouth germs are all over my stapler. The cutlery is a whole different story.

We didn't have cutlery or dishes at the last place I worked, so it was a non-issue. I never even used the microwave that was there because the inside was always filthy. Apparently, the people I worked with thought their mom was going to come by and clean up after them, and I wasn't about to step up to be their "mom".

Generally speaking though, I don't have any issues whatsoever with shared silverware as long as I know it's clean. And by clean, I just mean washed with soap and hot water with no visible stuck on food, congealed grease or other gunk.

When DH and I were dating seriously and I started going with him to his family lake cabin, I took one look at the dishes and silverware and immediately established myself as the resident dishwasher. Not because I particularly liked washing dishes, but because I liked eating off of CLEAN dishes!   

There wasn't a dishwasher there, the water didn't get particularly hot, and his mom liked using those flimsy blue dishrag things mentioned in the paper towel thread that have no scrubbing ability whatsoever and the cheapest, watered down generic dish soap a person can buy. Combine that with greasy bacon and egg breakfasts EVERY. DAY. And you end up with a lot of not-so-clean dishes! Eww. The first thing I did was go to the hardware store in town and bought some of those scrubber sponges, Dawn dish soap, a box of steel wool pads and some real dish cloths. I don't think those dishes had been that clean in 20 years! 

Now that we own the cabin, one of the first things I did was emptied out the kitchen gadget drawer straight into the trash. No matter what I did, there was no way some of that 40 year old stuff was getting clean, and if I couldn't get it clean I wasn't going to bother with it. I did spend some time getting to know a nice, heavy Pyrex dish quite intimately and it finally got clean after about 40 minutes with a Magic Eraser. Looks like new now!

True...lol We typically were to busy sterilizing the morning tools during lunch though to fit a few spoons in there.