Voyez le musée de papier hygiénique!
Uncle B is kind of a hoarder. Not the pathological kind of a hoarder, thank goodness, but…let’s just say we have sufficient canned beans to qualify as Mormons in good standing.
He says he got the acquisitional bug in the Seventies, when Britain lived through a series of strikes and Soviet-Union-style goods shortages. The kind of deal where he’d call friends and say, “ZOMG, there’s sugar in the market on my corner!” and everybody would swarm over and buy them out.
This is before the Blessed Saint Margaret of Conservative Principles rode into town and started kicking socialist butt, obviously.
Anyhow. Dude is stuck on buy.
Toilet paper is a particularly desirable inventory item. Lots and lots of toilet paper. I have to admit, he goes through it at a great clip. I’m pretty sure he goes into the loo in the morning, constructs a warm, soft nest, curls up for a nap and then flushes the lot away. This scenario meets the known facts exceptionally well.
Even after we moved and I discovered the hidden Federal Reserve of TP, I couldn’t convince him enough was snuff. So I took all the rolls out of the pantry and arranged them on the handy display shelf in the back bathroom. Why the hell there’s a shelf near the ceiling of the back bathroom, it doesn’t bear thinking of, but it worked. Beholdening his great stocks of fluffy non-wovens turned off the toilet-paper-buying machinery at last.
Mostly.
So today we have this exchange:
UB: “You know, we actually need to buy more toilet paper soon.”
SW: “You just bought a twelve pack two days ago! I couldn’t fit it on the shelf.”
UB: “Oh, that doesn’t count.”
I see. It has now become a shelf-stocking exercise.
Sometimes weasels are too damn clever for their own good.
March 19, 2009 — 7:30 pm
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