Fun & Famous
The dark world of toilet issues
Improvement is progress. But innovating for the sake of innovating is regression. And there is one thing where the goal was improvement but the end result goes down in history as a brutal deterioration: we are talking about the toilet paper holder.
The curved metal rod on the wall, with a cheekily raised end so that the toilet roll doesn't slip off when unrolling, works perfectly – to say the least, extraordinarily well. It rolls smoothly, the roll always fits around it, and a possible flap dances cheerfully up and down when you pull on the paper (provided that flap isn't made with a spring that presses the flap impossibly tight against the paper, so you can only get the paper off sheet by sheet). Rod with fresh rolls next to it and you're done.
But no. A scoundrel thought that the stuff had to be encapsulated and stacked on top of each other. How it works inside such a cabinet, I don't know, but what I do know is this: the paper never rolls off as it should, resulting in you always having only strips, half pieces, and tiny scraps in your hands. Which of course end up on the floor, creating a snowy landscape of unusable shreds. Chic. Always that hitch, that unwillingness of the toilet roll to give up any of its paper.
Once roll one has finally given up all its paper, roll two must drop down. Roll two doesn't drop, it stays demonstratively where it is. As a customer, you then have to reach into the cabinet with your hand to tug the roll down with all your might, which I find not very customer-friendly from the roll and the manufacturers of convenience products. If the tugging has been successful, the second trial follows: removing the toilet roll from its thick paper coat. That coat could have come off; as a toilet roll, you just have to swallow the fact that you wait for your fate in that cabinet in your birthday suit. But no, that paper coat stayed on. And let me tell you, it is impossibly strong. It takes about the strength and effort needed to tear a phone book (have you ever tried that?) and that too at an awkward angle. Impossible.
And so you have more of those clever ‘solutions’. Such a horizontal thing where two rolls hang next to each other, with a sliding flap that you have to move aside to access a new roll. That flap naturally doesn't slide. And here too, the roll mechanism performs poorly. Or such a cartwheel on the wall with a transparent flap through which you see all those fresh rolls, while the roll you need to pull from doesn't give an inch and as punishment, you get the whole lid on your fingers. Aargh.
Nothing clever, handy, or hygienic. Frustrating as hell. To the loo with it. And back with that wonderfully simple and simultaneously brilliant little rod.
