let's talk about toilet paper

Standing in the Wal-Mart checkout line yesterday with another $12 mega package, it hit me:  My toilet paper consumption has increased exponentially.

It’s just another side effect of working from home.

I guess this shouldn’t be all that surprising.  After all, offices have bathrooms.  Bathrooms with toilet paper.  So for those of us spending our days in an office, a certain amount of our toilet paper just shows up, neatly installed on the toilet paper holder by an invisible nighttime janitor.

If you do the math (and when you are standing in line at Wal-Mart on a Saturday, there’s certainly plenty of time for any calculations you’d care to undertake), eight hours at the office is a third of a 24 hour day, so logically toilet paper consumption would increase proportionately.  Even if you factor in the fact that eight hours of an average day are spent sleeping, usage should only double.

That doesn’t come close to the increase I’m seeing here.

Many small businesses join a warehouse club like Costco or Sam’s to save on office supplies.  As for me?  Well, I haven’t needed to buy legal pads or fancy pens since I started working from home.  Lately, however, I’ve been thinking that a membership might be worth the cost.  I'm pretty sure those discount clubs carry toilet paper, don’t they?