Scrub scrub...

I like guidance. It provides one with a much needed sense of direction. Good guidance channels our energy, moving us out of headless chicken mode to a measured, planned and systematic mode.

Timely guidance is even better, it's a light house on a dark and lonely night at sea, the one sign-board 50 meters before an extremely complicated junction that nudges you onto the right path. It's not only humans who guide other humans, animals do it too, I've seen hundreds of hours of programming on Discovery Channel in which a bear or cheetah or lion teaches it's young on the art of hunting, killing and generally on how to not be hungry.

I have always benefited from guidance, both timely and otherwise. My family and friends have all guided me and protected me against many of the pitfalls of adulthood. I've even received guidance on how to identify good and not so good guidance. In fact, among the things I relished the most in my move to the UK was the amount of guidance given to me by my new employers on the different tools and facilities available. There was a good amount of overload, but it helped immensely, especially after my harrowing experience at Dubai where I was given a laptop and asked to come back with the deliverable!

Why am I waxing eloquent on guidance, one may ask. Well, Mr. One, here's why. A recurring theme of this blog has been to point out places where the developed nations' attitude to advice and guidance has been overdone, prime examples being the hot coffee advisory, 'station floors are slippery when wet' announcement on the Tube when it starts drizzling (which is all the time here!), 'ladies and gentlemen, in this hot and inclement weather, it is advisable to carry a bottle of water with you at all times' when its warm enough to touch 15 degrees. You get the drift. Recently, however, I saw some guidance which rendered all this as valid. What I saw rocked my foundations and made me doubt the very faith in my survival as a human being.

It was a normal day, routine to the point of being boring. I was going about my business like I always do. While going about my business, I wanted to do some business, so I paid a visit to the gents. Job done, all smooth so far. I popped around to the wash-basin to wash my hands and admire my dashing good looks and I saw this:

I do not remember anyone telling me HOW to wash my hands since 4th grade and I felt terribly insulted even at that tender age that my father thought I should be taught how to do such a basic thing. Dad, being dad, would simply ignore me and drone on about the importance of cleaning between the nails and scrubbing behind my palms.

As always, a few things immediately came tumbling into my head.

• I was in this large company, which prides itself in the quality of people it hires. There is apparently a rigorous recruitment process involving multiple rounds of vetting and filtering. People walking in through the doors of this company are considered, by any stretch of imagination to be half-wits at the very least. This being the case, does the company really think it's employees don't know how to wash their hands?
• I immediately looked around the stalls looking for similar instructions on how to use the rest of the toilet. Obviously, if the company thinks people don't know how to wash up after, they surely don't think employees are capable of using extremely complicated gadgets like toilet paper and flushes
• Since the spread of disease is a real threat, will the people who fail to wash their hands be reported and investigated? You know, just to ensure that they were just being silly and the failure to wash hands properly is not a malicious threat to the peace and harmony? In other words are they going to be investigated to rule out a dastardly Al Qaeda plan to inflict pain and suffering?
• The diagram itself looked pretty confusing to me. Assuming I am at the lower end of the spectrum in the target audience, how is this going to be implemented? If I need to be told how to wash my hands, I should probably have issues with understanding anything more complicated than the alphabet.

Needless to say, I was so taken aback and insulted at being patronized so blatantly that I washed my hand without referring to the diagram. Just as I finished, I looked up to smirk at the picture when I saw the part about 'estimated time taken to complete the procedure - 40-60 seconds'. I'd done it in around 30 seconds. I felt naughty. Perhaps there is a camera hidden behind the mirror that records the time taken by each person and anyone taking less than 60 seconds is reported. I suppose I would have to get used to watching my back for the rest of my life now...