As part of our ongoing effort here at Current Configuration to make your life not only better, but also 10% more crunchy, we’re offering you this first installment of what will be an ongoing series of Essential Life Lessons. Kicking off this series will be a critical but even-handed examination of a common misunderstanding that occurs in a realm of many misunderstandings: the bathroom.
Put simply, there is a right way to hang the toilet paper, and a wrong way. Read on to determine the status of your own roll.
Toilet paper has a natural curve, a way of being that lends itself to certain orientations on the toilet paper spool.* If handled with skill and knowledge, it can provide an abundance of both sanitation and comfort, quilted together in each square of pillowy ply. If handled with clumsy ignorance, or worse, carelessness, it will beset the user with pain, filth, and frustration. Don’t let it end this way, with you curled on the tile floor of the stall, weeping in frustration, covered in wasted papier de toilette. To convince you, we’ve created some diagrams, harnessing the power of SCIENCE, to demonstrate the natural benefits of the over hanging method. First, we examine the optimal viewing benefits of the over hanging method.
Below are examples of the helpful and fruitful over-hung method on the left and the annoying and detrimental under-hung method on the right.
Notice the dramatic difference in the amount of visible toilet paper. Ironically, it is the over-hung toilet paper that has both the most visible free sheetage and the least amount of sheetage free from the roll to do it. Now, this may not seem like a big deal on its own, but in these extra sheets lies your undoing. Observe.
We here at Current Configuration, for the purposes of ease and expediency, do the one-handed tear (okay, really, it’s just me, but bear with me, er, us). The one-handed tear is a quick maneuver that takes advantage of the perforated squares, allowing your bundle of toilet paper to be liberated with one quick swipe of the arm. This is the foundation of bathroom ease, the cottony bedrock on which enjoyment rests in the restrooms of many nations.
The one-handed tear relies on a quick and forceful motion directed either away from or towards the tear-er. The forces applied in this motion are great and, like the atom, are not to be trifled with. The natural curve of the over-hung method allows the roll to stand fast after a one-handed tear, but the under-hung method creates a calamitous tendency in the roll. This tendency can only lead to this:
Wasted paper, frustration, the destruction of our forests. While we realize that it is possible to execute a one-handed tear on an under-hung roll, this is a game of sanitary Russian roulette. You are bound to lose eventually, and there is no re-rolling an unwound toilet paper roll. The results will only cause you grief. Don’t let this happen to you. Restroom attendants, janitors, maids, facilities crews, and responsible toiletowners take note: Don’t use the under-hung method for your toilet paper rolls. It leads to the destruction of our precious resources and the pillars of civilization as we know it!
*Does that thing have a proper name?
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Because you demanded it, we bring you the Overhanging Public Service Hanger Brochure.
Look, Over is obviously right–hotel maids can’t fold the little corners in neatly like they do if the roll is in the under configuration! Sheesh!
LOL.
Glad to know that for 37 years of marriage I have been right all along!
“That Thing” is appropriately called a to-do-to-do.
When allthe paper is gone you hold it to your mouth and make this sound…”TO-DO-TO-DOOOO!!”
Thank you sweet jesus for this. I spent an hour and a half in an enjoyable debate with my BF about why over is the correct, superior way. He completely discounted my scientific evidence. Now I have something to send him to prove I am right!! But more importantly than being right, is having the toilet paper in all the bathrooms put on correctly!
. . Altough I agree with these arguments and have been converting “under-minded people” to our “over way” for years now, I heard some arguments, recently, that are hard to beat. In Brazil, at least, there is the “right side” and the “wrong side” of the paper (because most of them have only one ply) and if you use the “over” configuration, when you roll the toilet paper in your hand, it will have the “hard side” out instead of the soft one (that will be out when you use the “under” configuration). . . Personally I always buy the “two plies” at least, so I don’t have this problem (and maybe that’s the reason I never figured it out before), but we have to admit that using the “hard side” instead of the “soft side” is a huge con. But there are other considerations that we need to make. For example: when you roll the paper in your hand with the “under” configuration, the “out” side will be passed on the wall (depending on your holder, of course)–and it doesn’t happen with the “over” way. . . If you use the better quality toilet paper it’s a no-brainer, though: over configuration hands down.
. . And can you please, please, give us the right to use the damn line break?
Fixed.