I've never worn (well, hardly ever) gloves for 'muckcanicking', as my late mother termed it, when I came in with filthy hands yet again.
When I first started work in path lab, I commuted to work on my new CB175, wearing my filthy black Belstaff wax jacket. I invariably had dirt off this coat under my fingernails, and then I would go off and do a ward round, taking blood samples from patients, no gloves worn in those early days. Wearing gloves would have saved a lot of embarrassment. And back in the lab we'd be using litres of formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, chloroform, xylene etc, all now regarded as carcinogens, for tissue processing, without any protection other than a white coat.
Gradually realised that this wasn't best practice, and when I was responsible for setting up our new lab in a new hospital made sure we had laminar flow downdraught benches, most of the nasty solvents were banned, and we all wore gloves. Then had the headache of pointing out to juniors that it was pointless wearing gloves if they did not discard them after contamination, rather than then sitting down at a keyboard still wearing their gloves, contaminated with blood or semen ( seriously).
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