= bums on counter

At primary school when we were forced to put our chairs up on our desks in the inverted manner at the end of the day I was always mildly concerned that the seats on which our bums had been sitting for most of the day were now in direct contact with the desk; they'd spent so long encouraging us to Wash Our Hands and now they were effectively making us sit at a desk with Bum Disease all over it? It was no better with teachers who encouraged or chair-shapes which required the chair to be placed the right way up atop the desks - that meant that all the mank off the floor would end up on the desk and ultimately all over our faces and in our mouths. In one particular classroom with one particular teacher we sometimes had to put one chair the right way up (only relative to the chair's normal operational orientation - still quite wrong when considering the optimal relative positions of both chair and desk) on top of the desk with the other chair in a chair-desk-pair upended upon the first chair so that the two seats' seats were immediately adjacent; this meant that unpleasantnesses emanating from one person would be transmitted onto the surface on which another person would then have to sit, and that was only if the chairs were put back the right way round in the morning.

Hopefully cafés and sandwich bars wipe the counter again when they take the chairs down in the morning.