There is no emergency that can be solved with a paper towel.
Not that I'm disagreeing, but how did you come to this stunning realization?
Glad you asked.
So I'm at the gym this morning, and the paper towel machine didn't complete the dispensing process completely, so there's no towel to grab ahold of.
The horror!
As is commonly the case, there is a knob on the side that you can turn to force the machine to turn and provide you with a paper towel. I go to turn the thing and get distracted by the large sticker on the side explaining how the knob works.
You're easily distracted.
The sticker says, in Bold Type I might add, "For emergency feed, turn knob..." This got me thinking just how overused the word "Emergency" is. Managers at work use it all the time to describe something slowing down, or when somebody has a question and the usual person to answer that question is on vacation.
It also got me thinking about what sort of "Emergency" situation could arise where somebody, wearing a cape or otherwise, could swoop in and announce to the gathered masses, "I'll save the day with my paper towel!" He or she could then procure a paper towel from the machine using the "Emergency" knob and wipe something up, thus saving countless lives, millions of dollars in property damage, and/or apprehending the spill fiend and giving them their comeuppance.
Well there is the situation where somebody infected with H5N1 comes into the gym and spends time on a treadmill, sweating and leaving residue on the bar or touch screen. When they're done, they try to wipe the machine down, but they can't because there's no readily available paper towel so they just leave the gym. Then, the virus is allowed to linger on the bar and multiply for hours or days at a time, mutating and becoming airborne due to the fans circulating, thereby infecting everyone who comes into the room all day. If just one of those people then heads to JFK for an international flight, they can infect every person in the airport, on the plane, in their destination country and the final destinations of everyone else on the plane, starting the very catastrophic chain reaction of Bird Flu infection that you yourself warned us about in a Theme Week last year. Within a week, the entire world's population is infected and dying, and all because there was no Emergency Feed on the paper towel dispenser.
I suppose there's that. In that case, I used the emergency feed, wiped down my treadmill and saved the world. I'll be expecting my medal soon.
4 comments:
Unfortunately, the emergency feed on most of those paper towel dispensers is the best mechanism for actually getting paper towels out of them... In an effort to try and encourage conservation of paper, these dispensers have only made it worse.
Thank you for saving the world.
My beef with some paper towel dispensers is that you go to pull down the exposed sheet and you get a towel the size of a postage stamp. Then you have to do this over and over till you get enough to properly dry your hands but you don't need the towels any longer because the wetness has evaporated because it took you 15 minutes to get the proper amount of towels. Whew!
Hitchhiker's 1, Amazon Browseable Edition, pp28-29:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoom; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand to hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
This is the word of the Hitchhiker's Guide. Thanks be to Douglas.
don't forget to bring your towel!
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