Man Shopping

After the last post I'm reluctant to continue on a toilet-paper related theme, in case you start to believe I have a fixation, but this was another event in this otherwise quiet week and, anyway, toilet stuff is inherently funny. The Bison household was running short of bog roll this week so Mrs. Bison asked me to pick some up on the way home from the gym. Her instructions were simple: it must be two-ply, and buy the extra long rolls, but not the mega-rolls because you need an extender to get them on the holder. The rest was up to me.

Color was easy - white. I also prefer to stay away from anything that involves cartoon bears crapping behind a tree with expressions of absurd delight on their faces. My other key decision criterion was price. I'm going to stick this stuff up my arse and flush it away, so what's the point in going "high-end"? I've already established, through bitter experience, that there's absolutely no correlation between price and the only meaningful measure of performance: whether your finger goes through or not. In fact the "softer and more absorbent" the product, the more chance you'll be conducting an involuntary self-prostate-exam at some point in the proceedings. Plus, I think it's a man-trait to try and get a good deal on stuff. We look at price per pound, price per sheet and price per pint whereas women tend to buy what they know and get the process done as quickly as possible.

Our local supermarket is very helpful in posting all the prices per square foot for toilet paper on the shelf price marker. Unfortunately it's in such small print that you have to walk up to each one in turn and squint at it to see what it says. So I started out by comparing the ususal suspects, but they were all ribbed, and I've not had much luck with ribbed bog roll in the "strength" department, so I started looking down the end of the aisle. There I found plain white bog roll at a good price per square foot, in long rolls, so I bought twelve rolls (no point coming back for a while if I can avoid it) and checked out.

When I got home the first question I received from my esteemed spouse was: "What did you buy?"
To which I responded "I bought bog roll - that's what you asked me to get, remember?"
"Didn't you get anything else?"
"No - if you wanted me to get something else, why didn't you ask me, then I would have got it!"
This is the fundamental difference between our shopping techniques, and one of the many reasons that we can never shop for food together: I go with a list, buy the list and leave; she goes with a vague idea of meals and buys what it occurs to her to buy when walking around. If it's not on my list the chances are slim to fucking none that I'm going to buy it. Her approach is good for actually getting us interesting food, but impossible to delegate to me.

Later on I received the terrible news: in my excitement to get good white, unribbed, inexpensive bog roll I'd unwittingly strayed from the two-ply product and bought single-ply, the "product of choice" of trailer-dwellers and cheapskates everywhere. No wonder it was a good price on a square-foot basis! Now if anyone comes to call I dread them using the bog and pegging us as cheap bastards based on our toilet paper choice. The good news though is that, cheap as it is, it's fabulous for strength. Fudge fingers are a thing of the past, and no cartoon bears anywhere to be seen!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison