That Toothpick Isn't Doing You Any Favors

There’s no shame in bringing dental hygiene into the workplace, in spending quality time with Colgate and mint floss after a lunch of leftover ribs. Are other people snickering at you in the bathroom when they think you're too consumed with mouthwash? Are they? Well, fuck them, with their gum disease and inevitable falsies and Super Poligrip stock investments and ghastly, kill-a-pig-at-50-feet halitosis, because these are fates that won't befall you. You’re doing the right thing, in the right way, with the right tools, which do not include toothpicks.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with toothpicks. They’re useful for baking, decoration, certain hobbies, and picking small pieces of food from between one's teeth. But I've noticed that a certain subset of tooth pickers do not discard their toothpicks once their usefulness is at an end; they hold on to the toothpicks, leaving them dangling disingenuously from one or the other mouth corner, for no apparent reason beyond a transparent attempt to strike a hard pose, to "butch it up." No one is impressed.

Prop flaunting with a toothpick qualifies as an impressive demonstration of toughness in a very, very limited number of situations, like if you're the sheriff in a jerkwater town out West, or you're an avowed cardsharp, or you're Gary Busey. But anybody else going that route naturally appears really, really pretentious, particularly when it's apparent to others—in an office situation, let's say—that no utility is attached to the toothpick still in the offender's possession, because no civilized person is going to pick his or her teeth in front of colleagues, we weren't raised in a barn, etc.

Seriously? No, don't. Please? Please. Here: have a Push-Pop, instead.