The oh-so-sanitary cup of water

It's a gloomy day outside.  Cold, wet, and dreary.  So I—not wanting to be brought down by the nasty winter-like weather outside—decided to go get my daily fix of Vitamin D by heading to the tanning bed and pretending I was thousands of miles away from DC for a blissful seven minutes (it's a high-powered bed ... don't want to burn).

As has become my every-other-daily tradition since buying my tanning membership last week, I walked across the courtyard to Starbucks.  It was pretty busy (although there weren't any cops this time), so I was hanging around waiting for my skim chai latte.  While standing there, I noticed that the baristas would casually throw a spoon into this little bin of somewhat boiling hot water, turn around and grab a cup, and then grab that spoon and use it to pour the next person's drink.  So I started wondering ... what's the purpose of this pool of hot water?

The natural assumption is that it's supposed to sanitize the barista's instruments in between latte pours.  But is that really happening?  If so, I don't think 15 seconds in a little pool of hot water is going to do the job.  And is it really necessary?  It's not like someone is going around licking the spoon in between the making of hot beverages.  Is it just to wipe away the residual whole milk on the spoon before it's used to pour a nonfat drink?  If that's the case, it seems a little ridiculous.  I mean, how much fat is really going to be absorbed in the transfer?  I really want to know what the purpose of the hot water is.

While pondering this unexplained water, I started thinking about the cup of water that we use to "sanitize" our ping-pong balls in between each throw during a game of beer pong.  You know—you're in the bar and using this ping-pong ball to throw into your opponent's cup (whom you may or may not know) in the hopes of nailing the toss so they have to chug the cup of beer.  Then they repeat the process in the hopes of making you chug a cup of beer. 

Now, the people playing beer pong usually make the throw maybe half the time.  If it's me playing, cut that down to about one-fifth of the time.  When you don't land the toss, the ping-pong ball ends up rolling around on the floor until someone can retrieve it, pick it up, and start throwing it again.  This floor could be a sidewalk or lawn (if you're at a tailgate or BBQ), a garage or basement (if someone's got it set up in their home), or the filthy, sticky, alcohol-covered floor at a bar.  No matter where you are, there is only one thing to clean up the ping-pong ball in between throws—a cup of water.

A few years ago, my friends and I were about to start a game of beer pong at our then-favorite Buckhead bar, CJ's (it has since been sold and demolished as a sacrifice to Donald Trump's condo-building scheme).  We had the beer, we had the cups, but we were missing one integral piece of the game—the cup of water.  So I went over to the bar and asked for a cup of water.  When I came back over with the water, a friend remarked that we really needed that—the "oh-so-sanitary cup of water."

I mean, it's so true.  What does that cup of water really do to clean off the dirt, the alcohol, and the whatever else that gets on that ball during a game of beer pong?  Answer?  Nothing.

Which is probably why there was a widely circulated (and false) story that beer pong spread herpes.  It started off on a humor outlet, got picked up by a college newspaper, then was promulgated by some local TV stations, and finally made it nationwide thanks to the hard-nosed reporting of Fox News.  Of course, no one apparently made the effort to pick up the phone and actually verify the story with the CDC (the supposed source of the beer pong-herpes connection), but that is an entirely different rant that needs to be undertaken at a future point in time.

Anyway, the point of all this (or at least the general gist) is that we do all these stupid things that really have no purpose.  I mean, why bother with the "oh-so-sanitary" cup of water?  In reality, it's really not doing anything to clean the ping-pong ball off.  The almost-boiling thing of water at Starbucks?  Honestly, what's the point?  What does it even do?  And seat belts on airplanes?  Don't even get me started on those (I once had a delayed flight because a seat belt was apparently missing from a seat, and the idiot sitting there actually called the flight attendant over because he was concerned about not having a seat belt!  This then caused a 30-minute delay because they had to come install another seat belt).  Seriously—do you actually expect a seat belt to save you if your airplane crashes?!?  Dude ... if the airplane crashes, you're dead.  End of story.

So why do we bother with all this?  It's just the illusion of safety.  The illusion that we're actually cleaning dirt and bacteria off with a little cup of water.  Or that our lives are going to be spared by a little strap of fabric if an airplane crashes.  I don't know.  I guess it makes us feel better about ourselves.  The economy's spiraling out of control, North Korea and Iran are always doing some crazy new ... something, and none of us knows what's going to happen next.  So the oh-so-sanitary cup of water makes us think something is under our control.  Hey ... at least we know we won't get herpes from beer pong.