Andy writes

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Andy writes a post from his old mailing list. The worst sort of toothbrush is the kind that has been sitting on the ground by the toilet for two days. I had already thought it was placed precariously (on the sink with about two inches of the handle hanging off), but it wasn’t mine and I didn’t know who’s it was, so I didn’t worry about it too much. It stayed pretty much like that for about a week and a half. Somebody was using it, I think. I wasn’t really examining it, but I don’t think it was in exactly the same place everyday. It was always just teetering on the edge of the sink, though, constantly taunting somebody, anybody, to knock it down with a stray pass of the elbow.
I guess that’s what finally happened, because two days ago I saw it on the ground by the toilet. My first impulse had been to pick it up, not wanting to leave a mess, but I could not, I realized, do this, because if I did, the toothbrush’s owner would never know about the time it had spent on the ground. And this wasn’t just any ground either, this was toilet ground. My second impulse was to simply throw it away. Unfortunately, this too seemed hasty. I didn’t know whose toothbrush it was. Maybe they wouldn’t really mind it being down there. Maybe they would only have to rinse it off under some warm water to be content. It really wasn’t my place to be making that decision for them, however unlikely it was that they would come to a different conclusion.
At any rate, I believe the toothbrush had been in use prior to its encounter with the tile floor, so it seemed to me that the owner would discover its compromised state within twenty four hours. This apparently wasn’t the case, as it is still there. I don’t know if the owner simply hasn’t thought to brush his teeth in all this time, or if he has simply decided that it was a lost cause and disowned his toothbrush as soon as he saw it on the ground, rescinding, along with his ownership, his duty to do something about it. I’m not sure if that is a legitimate way of handling things, but I can’t help but feel that it is most likely what happened.

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