Life Advice: Never Drink from the Plastic Lid

Dear everyone,

Here’s some more Life Advice. Never drink from the plastic lid on your to-go coffee cup. Not at Starbucks. Not at Speedway. Nowhere. Never.

Pictured here is my hand on my plastic lid at a coffee and donut shop to illustrate what you should envision happening every time.

In this instance, a woman was out in the lobby with a broom and dustpan. I walked in, she told me she’d be with me in a minute, she set the broom and dustpan down, walked behind the counter, took my order (medium coffee), punched the keys on the keyboard, took my $3 in singles, put it in the drawer, then used her fingers to give me .68-cents back as change. She then walked over to the coffee machine, grabbed a paper cup, put her fingers on the handle of the coffee carafe, poured my coffee, then grabbed the top 2 lids from the stack of lids, used both hands, separated them, and affixed the top lid onto my cuppa coffee. Then, she forcefully massaged the lid into place and then carried my coffee to me holding it with one hand by the lid (like the picture).

I’m not even a germophone. No more than anyone is after the pandemic, and this is an extreme example …but is it?

You can tell me that people wear gloves or wash their hands, but in order to secure the lid on the cup, they have to do some sort form of this maneuver to press it into place which means a palm and a hand touch the spot where you’ll put your mouth.

I’m sure the woman I describe above is a fine person but there was no way I was drinking from that lid.

I beg you … do not ever drink from the plastic lid when you order a drink somewhere.

Now you might be saying… “what about a place where you get your own coffee and there is a good chance that that lid may be germ-free?”

I’m thinking of a Speedway or 7-Eleven … or a gas station where I pour my own coffee. There’s cups and stack of lids. “Don,” you say … “I’m the only person handling that lid …that’s OK, right?”

WRONG!

Watch and observe a few people in front of you at the coffee machine handling the plastic lids. At some point in that plastic lid’s life, another human hand had to touch and stack those lids and put them in the lid stack. Also, you’re trusting that the person before you who took the top lid did it with such surgical precision that they did not touch your lid.

Think of the people coming into Speedway. They just filled up their gas tank or they went and did some scratch and wins and now they’re pouring themselves a cup of coffee. Those hands did many things before they grabbed a plastic lid for their cuppa coffee.

Final thing … I know … how much better is it drinking from the rim of the paper cup which might’ve had hands and fingers touching it. I think insurance companies call it “risk mitigation.” If you’re going to have a cuppa coffee – and we can all agree using a straw is not an acceptable way to drink hot coffee – you should limit grossness.

There you go. Do this and you’ll live 7.8% longer and get 42% fewer colds (I totally made up those stats).

This is the first in a 1,017 part series of Life Advice entries.