My husband did the supermarket shopping last week, and committed an egregious error: He bought cheap toilet paper. “It was on sale!” he protested when I confronted him, waving a loo roll and asking him what on earth he was thinking. “Do you realise how much we spend on toilet paper each week?” he demanded. “Just you wait,” I replied. “In about three days you’ll have to go back to the store for more, and if you don’t buy the good stuff, you’ll end up spending twice what we usually spend, just on toilet paper.”
I was right, of course. The 12-pack of cheap toilet paper he thought he was so smart in buying only lasted for three days, because the sheets were so thin they shredded at the merest hint of doing the duty they were intended for. The big kids complained of sore bums and dirty hands, and the single roll of “the good stuff” that was leftover from the previous week ended up being passed around the house like contraband in prison as we tried vainly to make it last.
Finally, the husband caved, and went back to the supermarket, coming home with two big packs of the kind of toilet paper I usually buy. Because if I know anything, I know my toilet paper. After years of using the cheapest one-ply in existence courtesy of the university loos, upon graduation, I vowed only to buy two-ply or higher. (Yes, really. After uni I also vowed never to sleep on a single mattress ever again, a promise which lasted until I had kids and ended up in their beds trying to soothe them to sleep at least once a week. So now I’d love to go back to the skinny single mattress of my uni days, because at least there wasn’t one or even two kids also squashed in there with me.)
So we started using the good toilet paper again, and things settled down. Until the other day, when my husband opened the local newspaper and spied a classified advert in the back. “Hey, toilet paper seconds for sale!” he said. “Really cheap! The address is a factory near my work. I could just nip over at lunchtime and…”
“Toilet paper seconds?” I replied, my voice reaching hysteria pitch on the last syllable. “Are you kidding me? Now you want to not only buy cheap toilet paper, you want to buy cheap toilet paper that has something wrong with it?”
“Uh…” He closed the paper. “Nope. No, I do not.”
Now, about those single mattresses the kids sleep on…
Katherine Granich
