People! Use Gloves, For The Love!

    Yesterday one of my Facebook friends posted a strange-but-true story reported on CBS news about a woman who suffered a rare side effect from chemotherapy:  the chemicals caused her fingerprints to permanently disappear:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rare-side-effect-of-chemotherapy-erased-fingerprints/

    Now the woman has to go through life without fingerprints.  But her doctor provided her with a note explaining that her loss of fingerprints was caused by chemotherapy. Though I don't actually get why in a situation where fingerprints are required the requirement would be waived if one lacked fingerprints but had a a doctor's note for it  but not waived if one lacked fingerprints but didn't have a doctor's note for it.
    I mean, if you don't have fingerprints you don't have fingerprints, right? 
    I guess this subject is of especial interest to me because I don't have any fingerprints, either,

See? That's my thumb.  No prints, just a few lines and creases with an old childhood scar down the middle of the top part.











The rest of them are no better.

    I don't know exactly how long I've been without my prints but they've been gone for at  least the past 20 years. 
    Probably longer, but it was just about that long ago that it was first revealed to me, much to my shock, that my prints were just a bunch of illegible scribbles.
    At the time I was a volunteer mom at my children's elementary school, St. Matthew's.  I'd already been volunteering for years,  as a Story-Time Mom, Cafeteria Mom, I taught French classes a few times a week,  was the piano accompanist for the musical productions, and I'd begun substitute-teaching for the school's music teacher and sometimes for other classes as well. 
    But with the all the publicity of the priest pedophilia scandal at that time it was decided that measures needed to be taken to protect school children from sexual predators.  To this end all the  moms volunteering in the parochial schools in the Columbus Diocese were required to have their fingerprints taken by the police.
    So the Gahanna Police came to St. Matthew's one day to take the volunteer moms' fingerprints and when it was my turn to be printed, though the officer tried several times,  no prints showed up on the blotter,  just a bunch of criss-crossed lines.
    So I was sent down to the Gahanna police station to have my prints taken by some special machine they have there for recalcitrant fingers.
    Still no prints.   
    The police officer who took my prints at the station asked me if I washed a lot of dishes.
    "Yes, I do,"  I replied.
    "Scrub your floors often?" he asked.
    "Pretty much,"  I replied. 
    "Clean bathrooms?" 
    "Well, yeah."
    "Wear gloves when you clean?"  he asked.
    "Um, no,"  I answered.
    "Well," he declared,  "what you did is you wore off your fingerprints from all those years of exposing your hands to harsh household chemicals."
    "Oh,"  I said, gazing in wonder at my bald finger tips.
    Fortunately I squelched the impulse to crack a joke about how  I guessed I ought to take advantage and go out and rob a bank, or something.
    Anyway, the parish came to the decision to make an exception and let me keep volunteering and substitute-teaching even though I permanently flunked my fingerprinting from unprotected house cleaning.
    So that's my  story.
    It never made the news.