I recently had important Hmm Daily business in New York City, and I decided to spend the extra dough and travel from my remote workstation in Baltimore via Amtrak, which is way less tiring than driving, and all-around better compared to taking the bus; faster, bigger seats, a snack bar, even.
When I arrived in New York, I had an urgent need to do something I generally do not enjoy doing, which is using a public lavatory, and furthermore, using a public lavatory in one of the busiest transportation vectors on the planet, but my need overrode my reservations, so I found a stall in the men’s room, where I took this photograph.
There’s a web site out there called There, I Fixed It, which mocks and celebrates examples of crude but effective remedies to all manner of home improvement and tech challenges, and this toilet paper dispenser is a solid and successful kludge. My basic human need for a specific paper product was attended to! We’ve all seen the other way that someone in charge of a public lavatory handles the failure of the toilet paper dispenser, which is to just stack up rolls on the closest available surface, and I’m not, I think, overly squeamish about this sort of thing, but if the paper is just sort of sitting on something, it means the paper is TOUCHING STUFF BEFORE IT TOUCHES ME, possibly even falling to the dreaded floor, where people’s shoes go, at the very least, so someone in charge of this public lavatory took care of the Public, and I would like to salute them.
