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.
Try it, the under method is much easier to tear than using with one hand than over the top method. You just hold the roll with the back of your hand, while grasping the unrolled sheet pull and the sheets separate. You can’t do that with over the top method.
No to mention, for those who have cats… The under method is the only way to avoid coming home to find the TP scattered all over the house.
Obviously, you are chauvinistic toward right-handed users. Your entire diagram breaks down for the lefties.
Also, the under-roll method is the perfect solution to preventing young toddlers from turning the bathroom into a confetti zone.
Finally someone put it in images everyone can understand..
If you place your elbow on top of the tissue paper and then pull with the same hand..you can successfully single handedly get the tp with no problem.
I really don’t understand why we shouldn’t just do away with toilet paper all together. Wiping is very over-rated. Everyone does it. I, for one, say NO to this and will no longer wipe. Furthermore, I will destroy any toilet paper spool that I come in to contact with, public or private, in order to push my cause forward and open as many eyes as I can.
I don’t know we even allow a web page posted by over hangers. I mean, they’re basically not even really human.
I don’t know why we allow postings from over hangers, see’in as how they ain’t really even human!
WRONG! Under is the best way. It looks better, and when you load UNDER it helps to avoid the paper from over-rolling out of control…. then you have to “re-wind” the paper and it looks like crap! Just because the paper is closer to the user, it doesn’t make it right. Under is the proper and more classy way to load paper products. End of story. The recent Cottonelle Poll got it wrong, btw.
I don’t get it….are people seriously having THIS mush trouble getting their butts wiped without a catastrophy? Elbows? One handed manuevers? Cats, KIDS….??? What are you people doing? I go, and I wipe!! And don’t even need a plan or formula….i think it is being way over thought here!! ;)
heres my opinion. dont shit on your hands so you can use both your hands. just wondering how did you get shit on your hand if you didnt even wipe yet? grab from top with right/left if left handed and use other to stop it so you can rip it off btw too runny of poop = you drink too much liquid too dry = too little liquid being drank fiber helps your body clean out your body(fiber is in bread and some other things) if ur poor and dont wanna buy lots of tp, TRY… folding 3 squares into 1 and wipe fold in half, fold in half, fold in half unless you have messy poop where it gets EVERYWHERE on the tp, then i guess you just suck
Finally someone puts the world’s white trash in their place. Over is proper and the way that toilet paper was meant to roll. BUT there are, of course, exemptions to this rule for those who wish to child-proof their bathroom. I don’t agree with the cat comments. I had three cats in my first apartment and they were much more likely to engage in paper-play if the roll was hung the wrong way (my roomie insisted, so whoever hung it, got to enjoy the way we thought ‘proper’. Needless to say we no longer live together).
All this and I’m right-handed. I rarely rip with one hand.. I have no need to do so. Where’s your other hand people? What are you doing with it? I shudder at the thought.