Chris

Paper Towel Dispensers

It used to be that when you'd go into a public bathroom, you could do your business, wash your hands, and use as many paper towels as you needed to dry your hands off afterward. In the past few years though, I've noticed more and more of those electronic paper towel dispensers creeping into public bathrooms. These are the little devices that require you to wave your hand in front of it before it will dispense a paper towel. Now you know, the first time I saw one of these, I just knew that I was somehow going to be screwed over by the presence of this new device. Sure enough, not only do they sometimes not even recognize my hand waving, but when it does it spits out a paper towel the size of a doily about two seconds after I asked it to. This leads to me having to wave my hand in front of the thing about 5 more times so I can get what I deem to be the proper amount of paper towels for drying my hands off.

I fully realize that my hatred for this device could be the fact that it doesn't meet my standards in this "get what I want, when I want, NOW" society we live in. But if we forget about that for a second, we can focus on the fact that these new dispensers create more opportunities for the occurrence of a special type of problem: "faux pee spots on khaki's". This is much more a problem for men than it is for women. See ladies, what happens to us guys wearing khaki's is that we wash our hands (hopefully) and then we need to get our dripping wet hands from the sink to the paper towels. This is a delicate process, for one false move could send a wayward drop of water dangerously close to the front of our khaki's. That drop of water creates a wet spot that gives the appearance of a man who was so in a hurry that he peed his pants a little on the way out of the restroom. The repeated motions needed for these new dispensers increase the risk of sending water droplets everywhere!

I know that some guys don't care about this, but I frankly do care whether or not people believe I peed in my pants a little. If I get a spot like that on my pants, I have to walk out of the restroom like that and hope it air dries pronto. In the meantime, anyone who sees it (and in my mind, that is everybody) requires a special disclaimer from me explaining that I in fact do NOT have pee on my pants. Now that's what they call an icebreaker.

Coooookies

Well here we go again with the political correctness folks. Recently, there was a news story about some expert who wanted Santa to “slim down” because he was setting a “bad example” for kids by being fat. First of all, let me say a few things about all these egotistical “experts” we have. Based on my personal and professional experience with “experts”, I’m convinced that the only thing standing between Larry the Cable Guy and a Masters or Doctorate degree is enough money to pay the right clown college for a piece of paper that you can hang on your wall to make you feel good about what you’ve “accomplished” and make you feel entitled to dole out 10-cent advice on subjects you mainly recall from a textbook. Listen, first of all, Santa Claus has always been fat and he’s lived for hundreds of years as a fat man. Its part of his freakin’ image, leave him alone! Secondly, I cannot remember one instance as a child where I saw Santa and said to myself “Santa’s so fat, I wish I could be fat one day!”

Here’s the thing some adults and “experts” don’t get: kids don’t think like adults. When you’re a kid, Santa is the guy that slightly intimidates you but that you tolerate on account of the fact that your parents encourage it and the guy brings you loads of gifts every year at the same time. It may come as a shock, but kids don’t spend a whole lot of time considering how clogged his arteries might be, what his body mass index is, or whether his rosy cheeks are a sign of elevated blood pressure.

Next thing you know they’ll be prying the Coke bottle out of his hands and replacing it with some “environmentally friendly” bottled water. No? How about banning him from entering your house through the chimney. Didn’t you know that the fabric in his suit combined with the lining in the chimney emits a chemical that drowns polar bears?
It reminds me of what they tried to do to Cookie Monster. Remember that whole thing about “experts” advising that “a cookie is a sometimes food”? When I finally saw that sketch where Cookie Monster chose fruit over cookies, I wanted to puke. So I guess instead of asking parents to do their jobs and limit their kids cookie intake, they feel the need to change the rate at which Cookie Monster eats cookies? Hey, I’m not an expert on Cookie Monster, but when he starts preferring fruit to cookies, he suddenly finds himself completely at odds with his own identity. He’s always been a guy with a seriously unhealthy penchant for eating cookies and anything that gets in his way and (watch this) we like him that way.

My advice for the “experts” is to spend a little more time having fun in life and a little less time desperately clinging to an identity whose sole survival is dependent on an endless need for professional validation at the expense of all that is innocent. Good for you, you have a piece of paper on your wall. What do you want, a cookie? Oops.