More on hand washing from Miss Manners

Dear Miss Manners:

I was taught that when you used a guest towel in a powder room or bathroom, you crumpled it and left it, obviously used, on the counter. Just as you leave a used linen napkin crumpled beside your plate after a meal.

After a visitor has used the facilities, rather than gathering up a couple of guest towels for the laundry, all the towels on display have to be laundered because you have no idea which one was used.

Miss Manners has dreadful news for you. Brace yourself.

None of those towels was used. That's right. Those guests, whose hands you so warmly shook at their departure, probably didn't wash.

No, wait, that's not quite fair. Some may have used tissues they had in their pockets. Some might have used the toilet paper and then re-flushed. Some might have stayed in the bathroom until their hands air-dried.

But all of them were reared with the idea that a guest towel is a totem object that one must never touch, even when one happens to be a guest. They will use your own private bath towel, if they can find it, rather than sully a guest towel.

Why this is, Miss Manners cannot say. Even people with no discernable manners adhere to this peculiar belief. They would argue that this saves work for the hostess, as if she would welcome such an unsavory and unsanitary practice. Alas, as you point out, it doesn't even do that.