Grandma's sanitizing method

Everybody is obsessed these days with hand sanitizing. You see dispensers in gyms, schools, daycares, and doctor’s offices.  You see little bottles of purell hanging from diapers bags, purses, and even belt loops.  Now when you finish shaking someone’s hand you count to ten and then watch them grab for the purell to wash off your germs.  Everyone thinks this a relatively new phenomenon but I’m here to tell you it is NOT.  My grandma invented the germ free idea…. but she didn’t have purell.  Before there was purell…. there was scalding HOT water!  I remember when I was a kid my grandma would supervise my hand washing.  She would turn the water hotter and hotter until I would scream “It HURTS!” to which she would reply, “that is how you know it’s killing the germs!”  The water temperature in my grandparent’s house would get so hot from the tap you could hard boil an egg in two minutes.  She wasn’t just making me wash like that……she washed that way, too… and had the scars on her hands to prove it.  My grandfather had really calloused hands.  When I was a kid I thought that was from all the work he did around the house, in the yard, on the cars, etc.  Later I realized it was from my grandmother encouraging him to kill germs by washing his hands in a pot of almost boiling water!  We now like to kill germs with an alcohol gel that evaporates… my grandma liked to kill germs by burning off several layers of skin.  I guess it worked because both of my grandparents lived to be 94.  Maybe I’ll take up the germ free scalding method……. I don’t know….. it’s a process.