Potty Peeves

Pet peeves, revisited. Okay, I already wrote a post on pet peeves a while back. But they were biggish ones. However, we all have these teeny, weeny little pet peeves—things that annoy us every time we encounter them—but they are so picayune that we never think to discuss them amongst our friends. Here are a few of mine, all relating to toilet paper, which, now that I think of it, seems to be something of a theme of mine. This list, though, is mercifully shorter than my first pet peeve post.

1. Those toilet paper rollers in public restrooms that are meant to limit your TP usage. I understand that their desire is to keep nimwads from taking a huge wad and then causing the toilet to back up (and then flooding the bathroom with raw sewage and going off and leaving the mess behind and not even bothering to report it to the business's staff). But really, do they have to make it so that they feed out one sheet of TP at a time? I mean, you keep rolling the thing, it dispenses one sheet and then stops rolling. You tear off that sheet, roll it again, and get one more sheet. It takes a LONG time to accumulate enough TP at that rate. And if it's one-ply, you might be there all day.

2. And as long as I'm on potty matters: Perhaps the one-sheet-at-a-time dispensers are better than those other dispensers. The ones that are like a big drum with a humongous roll of Eastern-bloc-grade toilet paper in it. The TP dispenses at the bottom. You roll out a generous (but not toilet-clogging) supply, yank on it, and find that it is impervious to tearing, even on the serrated edge of the dispenser. You yank again. Rather than it tearing, it just dispenses more paper. Oh, my. Don't these public-bathroom dispensers just go from the sublime to the ridiculous? You keep trying to get it to stop, and you finally have to reach down, hold the paper against the cutting edge and really yank hard. In so doing, the paper gets pulled so hard that it gets yanked into a tight tube of paper rather than a fluffy pile. You now have something more akin to butt floss than to toilet paper. You are on your own to figure out how to use butt floss, as I'm not going there.

3. And, the final toilet paper complaint of the day: when the two-ply TP roll gets off sync at the manufacturing plant, and the perforated lines on the roll you get are not aligned properly. It's hard to figure out where to stop it. Very small peeve, but an annoyance when it happens to you.

I remember when it was just called toilet paper

What is it with toilet paper--er, I mean, bathroom tissue--commercials these days? Toilet paper seems to have come out of the closet, so to speak, recently, and--in my opinion--is getting too real for daytime television.

One commercial has a woman standing there, saying, "It's time to get real about what goes on in the bathroom."

And I think, "Really? Must we?"

I mean, really. Does anyone truly want to talk about this? Just walking into the bathroom after some people is too real an experience for me.

And then Charmin has its bear family (not to be mistaken for the bare family, though the bears are bare, now that I think about it). The mama bear routinely inspects her son's bottom for "pieces" that have been "left behind" (her words). Now, really. If you are more than three years old and your mom even occasionally inspects your bottom, then there is something wrong going on in your family. And she even calls it "inspection." Come on, Charmin! This is just downright creepy.

Then there's this weird product called Comfort Wipe. I'm not even going to go there. Literally. It's not TP itself, but it's a TP enhancer, you might say. It, too, would be creepy if it weren't so ridiculous that it seems like a spoof.

I confess that I do find the Angel Soft commercial funny--the one in which the guy's wife throws a roll of TP that takes the hair off the side of his head (because that TP is "too hard") and then the next roll, which is "too soft" explodes into fluff in his hands. But, you see, that one gets a little farther away from the topic of what, exactly, the TP is going to be used for.

Don't we all know what it's going to be used for? Do we really need to "get real" about it? I think not. We know that it's not really used for removing makeup, and none of us know what that blue fluid is that they're always pouring onto toilet paper and feminine hygiene products. No, we all know to what end toilet paper is going to come. And we don't really need to get specific about it, as far as I'm concerned.