WARNING: The following blog may be the most important thing you ever read. And it's about poop.
The other day I found myself in one of the more uncomfortable situations a man can find themselves in; miles from home when my stomach was overtaken by a churning sensation. I was going to have to use a public restroom to take a dump. There is a brilliant scene in Zombieland that illustrates the complicated emotions that occur in a trip to the public restroom. A person is really at their most vulnerable when they are taking the kids to the pool regardless of whether or not a zombie apocalypse is happening. This feeling of vulnerability makes it so I am rarely 100% relaxed when in a public restroom thus making almost every experience a fiasco.
It takes very little to send me off the rails with rage and frustration when I'm on a foreign toilet. Weird noises and smells from neighboring stalls and a toilet seat that is either too hot or cold can halt the process dead in it's tracks and we certainly can't have that. Before the top button of my pants is even undone my mind is completely discombobulated. Luckily nature is able to take it's course and I let out a giant sigh of relief. In retrospect this sigh probably creeped out some fella with a similar disposition into constipation, oh well. Everything seems to be in the clear until I reach for some TP. Oh no. Good God no. Why?!
1 ply. I'd rather there not be any toilet paper than be forced to use the abomination that is 1 ply toilet paper. While you may have to go to some trouble the absence of TP is a solvable problem. 1 ply offers up a much more difficult dilemma. You can't just go to another stall hoping for salvation. If one stall is cursed by the 1 ply plague than they all are. 1 ply forces you into a sort of Mexican Standoff when you are at your most vulnerable. Do I choose to forgo wiping completely and make myself completely miserable and the target of possible scorn and humiliation? Or do I risk actually using the hellish stuff? Either way I am left wishing that I had never even left the house.
At home I have the super thick (yet fluffy!) 2 ply stuff that refuses to break down regardless of what it encounters and I assume that most other people do as well. You know why? Because I want as many barriers as possible between my hand and my ass. I know damn well that I'm not the only person that feels this way. If I had my druthers I would use 38 ply toilet paper but I'm sure some tree hugger would consider that "wasteful". I actually believe that 1 ply may actually defy all known physics, it may even contain the Higgs Boson for all we know. It is practically see through and appears to be flimsy enough that it would disintegrate if a breeze hit it. Yet when it makes contact with my delicate undercarriage it scratches and burns more than the harshest sandpaper. I may not be a man of science but I'm pretty confident that it is impossible for a material to share those properties.
I am left to ponder just how much money is actually saved by purchasing 1 ply. Just how much can the difference be? I can't imagine it being anything sizable. Whatever is saved with the quality of 1 ply has to be negated by the fact that people use so much more of it at a time. At most it can only be a difference of a couple cents per roll. Is the pittance saved really worth torturing everyone who has the misfortune of using the restroom? There has to be some evil genius who doesn't care about shaving a couple bucks a year off of the budget but instead revels in the fact that every single person who uses the restroom will leave far more miserable than they were when they walked in. Or is it possible that the janitors of the world stock it in order to cut down on the number of people who use the public restrooms in order to save themselves a bunch of work? If this were actually the case I would tip my hat, it would be a brilliant tactic.
Let's tone it down a little, I'm not saying that the proliferation of 1 ply toilet paper is as horrible as human trafficking, but it's got to be in the conversation. If 1 ply wasn't stocked in the majority of public restrooms taking a shit in public would still suck, there's no question about that, but it would ease the situation a little bit. 2 ply would be like a steak and a cold brew for a last meal before being executed as opposed to the meal of spam and hydrochloric acid that is 1 ply. I think it's time that we occupy the nation's public restrooms and demand all the rights our founding fathers intended for us to have. We don't ask for much, just sinks that work, some clever graffiti and one measly additional ply to our nation's TP. I don't think that's asking too much.
No comments:
Post a Comment