Paper towels

The paper towel dispenser in the bathroom at work is totally entrancing. It is electronic in nature, so all you have to do is wave your hand around in front of it, and a length of paper towel automatically dispenses from it. Now, this would be a little cooler if it also tore off the paper towel for you, but I guess that would give rise to problems like if you weren't prepared and the paper towel fell on the floor and was wasted, but they could get around that by doing like receipts do and only tearing off most of the way, but I guess that would be pointless.

Anyway, the paper towel dispenser has not been doing so well of late. Hitherto it would flash a red light while dispensing paper towels, a reassuring red light that flashed steadily and reminded you that you needn't fear, the paper towel dispenser was on the job, automatically dispensing paper towels, all would be ready in a jiffy, and there was a nice humming noise to reinforce the point. In the past week or so, the paper towel dispenser's light has been a little more spasmodic (or I could be imagining that it's spasmodic because of how scary it sounds), and instead of humming calmly, it made this dreadful grinding noise. Grind, grind. Paper towels! Grind, grind. More paper towels!

Not very nice.

And today it was broken. Long live the king. (Not really. There is no replacement. We must just tear paper towels with our bare hands now. I mean, I've practically forgotten how, what with all these weeks of pampering and automatic dispensing.)

This reminds me of these two high school girls I heard talking in the bathroom at Bongs & Noodles a little while ago. They were fussing because the B&N loos were apparently not living up to their high high expectations of public bathrooms. One girl was whining to the other one, "They don't have automatic paper towel things!" and the other one said, "Yeah, I know. I love those automatic things at school. I always try and get the stalls with the automatic flush toilets."

Uh-huh. All I can say is that, wow, did we ever go to different high schools. I always tried to get the stalls with doors.

(Obviously I always succeeded, or else waited. It was parallelism, I couldn't say it any other way.)

Spoiled rich kids. What's the world coming to? Kids these days don't know how good they've got it. In my day we had to dig holes for our poop and set fire to it when we were finished so the cats wouldn't dig it up again. In my day we didn't have running water, we had to get our own hydrogen and oxygen and bang 'em together. And I had to walk to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, with stapled-together matchboxes for shoes. So.