Thursday, November 12, 2009

The more days you go without blogging, the harder it is to get back to it. You feel like you need to return with a larger-than-life tale and not some minor anecdote about the time the line at the coffee shop was so long that you forgot what you were going to order by the time you got up there. (Note, you look like a fool standing in front of a barista, with your mouth wordlessly opening and closing like a caffeine-deprived fish).

You want to come back with a big story, full of inspiration and insights about the human condition!

Instead, you write about the bathroom at work.

So, the bathroom at work has reached a new low. Sure, it was weird when there was a peanut on the floor for weeks, the brownie chunks were alarming, and finding sushi on the floor was too disturbing to even blog about, but the worst bathroom atrocity of them all has now befallen our work place. I speak, of course, of single-ply toilet paper.

I understand that in these difficult financial times, one might choose to save on toilet paper. I get that. By all means, skip over the 4-ply Egyptian-cotton pre-warmed pillow-top models. I am indeed willing to sacrifice comfort for financial security. There might even be some good 1-ply brands out there although I'm not actually sure, having never personally seen any 1-ply TP before this.

This stuff at work though is ridiculously thin. It's wafer-thin. It disintegrates at the merest touch. It's not even really toilet paper, it's Heisenpaper. It cannot be both grasped and used at the same time.

Each time you try to wipe with the stuff, it's an adventure, assuming your definition of adventure consists entirely of trying to avoid getting crap all over your hands. You just kind of have to load up on the 1-ply, piling microlayer after microlayer on top of each other, and hope beyond all reason, that those 3 or 4 molecules of toilet paper can achieve a wiping miracle.

It doesn't hurt to beg your ass to take mercy on you either.

Please let the recession end soon.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heh, Heisenpaper. That's really good.

--Pablo

yajeev said...

So funny, Mike... after having been on a bit of a blog drought myself, one of my candidate comeback posts was centered on the very same topic: 1-ply.

Oh, have I got a few horror stories. Someday.

Mike said...

Thanks Pablo. That joke had a small potential audience.

Hey Yajeev! I am delighted to be on the leading edge of the 1-ply blogging meme. I look forward to your caboose.

Anonymous said...

The Heisenpaper audience is there. I'm just uncertain where or how fast.

Mike said...

I guess everyone loves a good Heisenjoke.

Ms.PhD said...

yeah, you know it's bad when you find yourself seriously considering bringing your own stash of real TP to work and keeping it hidden in your desk drawer. I mean, seriously.

Mike said...

Hey Ms. PhD! I had a buddy when I worked at Hewlett Packard who had a health issue that caused him to use the facilities multiple times each day at work. He really did carry around his own favorite brand of toilet paper.