Unhelpful

When I was a young child visiting Grandma, one thing you could always count on was the toilet paper. I have no idea where she bought it, but apparently in the late 70’s and early 80’s it was possible to find recto-sanitation materials of a much different variety than your typical 90’s toilet paper.

The stuff she would buy was a deep but almost pastel blue, smelled just like cheap purfume (because humans, like cats, apparently go around sniffing each others’ anuses), and it was extremely soft. In fact, it probably had more in common with the lint you find in your dryer after doing a load of jeans than the stuff in my bathrooms. Grandma’s mystical toilet rolls were so soft and thick, in fact, that as a high-volume toilet paper user, I would frequently stop up the toilet with it.

Contrast this to what the United States Air Force purchases. This was the exact opposite in many respects; it is utilitarian, somewhat rough, functional, no-frills - dependable. It is cheap, but it does the job. You wouldn’t want to use it instead of Kleenex to stuff in your nostrils to stop up a nosebleed, but for wiping your sphincteral region, it certainly performs in a satisfactory manner.

To go one step further, though, you’d have to visit the “Secret Government Agency That Does Not Exist Despite Being Well-Labelled Via Highway Signs” in Laurel, Maryland, where I served my last three years in the military. This is a textbook example of the pitfalls of government contracting. To those of you not in the know, government contracting “functions” like this:

The government lists its specifications for a given contract. Lots of contractors bid. The government accepts the lowest bid.

This logic is, apparently, based on the common sense lesson you and I learned as children:

THE BEST WAY TO GET QUALITY IS TO SPEND AS LITTLE MONEY AS POSSIBLE.

The quintessential evidence of this is the SGATDNEDBWLVHS’s toilet paper. This abomination comes on those big industrial rolls that are about eighteen inches in diameter. This is the flimsiest, least absorbent, thinnest, most braindead toilet paper imaginable. It rips off the spool sooner than you want it do, and using it on your netherportions is reminiscient of taking a Gideon bible and trying to wipe your exit ramp with the Book of Genisis - in fact, it is much closer to crepe-style bible paper than it is to anything you could find in the bathroom product aisle at your local supermarket. One might assume that I could get a vicarious thrill over this rather blasphemous analogy every time I defecated, but one would be sadly mistaken, as the frustration level was too great.

For home use, me and my wife usually buy something cheap but good such as Angel Soft (I swear the company that makes this should think about renaming it Anal Soft and start an honest marketing campaign).

I had an experience at work, though, that might cause me to re-think that. They’ve recently switched to “New Charmin”. Without getting overly graphic, let’s just say this stuff grabs mud from your back door better than anything I’ve used before. It has a pattern which is inaccurately called “quilting” despite absence of thread. Unlike other quilted posterior cleanliness products, this one might be better termed “textured”.

Consider picking up a four pack and trying it for yourself. You will thank me later.

If the people who think the prefix
“cyber-” is cool like to call Internet
users “netizens” started talking about
toilet paper connoisseurs, would they
call them shitizens?

Stay tuned for Advanced Acute Fecophilia, coming soon.