The question of how to install the roll of toilet paper is, I am told, one of the most hotly-debated questions of the past century or so. Only the fact that the roll takes a while to be used up is apparently the only thing that keeps it from being as large an issue in the average marriage as resetting the thermostat or the proper position for the toilet seat. Articles have been written in which reporters asked assorted celebrities whether THEIR toilet paper is dispensed over or under the roll. (I don’t recall which celebrities were which, nor whether opposing sides married each other, but I DO remember which ones added that they used up toilet paper faster than other people because, fearing bristle damage from toothbrushes, they just rubbed their teeth with a sheet of toilet paper after each meal. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that moves into my brain and ignores eviction notices.)
From here, of course, writers frequently move on to the history of the product. They MUST refer to the breakthrough research of this century, when one clever little rabbit decided to look up the original patent application. Yes, the inventor shows the roll loaded so the paper is delivered over the top of the roll. As if THAT solved anything.
More enterprising authors will rummage up an online photo of one of the rare toilet paper books our more genteel ancestors used before the roll came along. This was a bound volume of tissue paper pages of assorted colors which could be torn out as required. The photo automatically leads to a consideration of the similar use to which the Sears Roebuck catalog was put.
It’s not a thing I brag about, but I AM old enough to have known people who could reminisce about those difficult days when they reached for the catalog only to discover that other family members had used all the black and white pages. The catalog would not be replaced with another until all the pages were gone, and those slick colored leaves showing summer hats were NOT optimized for this secondary function. I am even old enough to have had a teacher who begged our pardon while responding to a complaint with “Well, that’s rough as a cob.” He was unaware that not a person in the room understood the apology, being too young to recall when corncobs took the place of Sears’s home convenience.
Another thing I don’t brag about is that I realized at an early age that as long as the toilet paper was around when needed, I didn’t especially notice whether it came to me over or under the roll. The reason I don’t brag about this is that it usually leads to That Look. I should be used to it by now, I suppose. Maybe it’s not the Look but that little half step backward.
I THINK I usually install a new roll so the paper comes out over the roll, but I cannot vouch for my consistency in this matter. I plead in my defense only that I DID live for years in an apartment where the toilet paper roll hung to the left of the throne, which is naturally going to throw off the routines of a righthanded user.
Moving past the obvious conclusion we should be arriving at from all of this–that writers short on things to write about can always get a page or so writing about potty paper—we observe that, unlike outhouses, rolls of toilet paper get almost no representation on postcards of the past. Of course, the outdoor toilet prompted both chuckles and nostalgia, whereas jokes about toilet PAPER risked reopening the argument about proper display. (You will note, by the way, that two of the three postcards which show the roll hanging up have the paper descending over the top of the roll. This may just be anecdotal data to you low rollers, but the evidence is right there on the paper.)
Blogsy Babbles 