By now it should be obvious that confusion species is all about first world problems. But, of course it’s not so simple izzit?
First, today’s first world problem.
They’ve got this Tork toilet paper dispense at the office. It’s a big old thing made of plastic that takes a big old toilet paper roll and squeezes the paper through a little plastic anus for the user to extract. The extraction happens under pressure from the strict sphincter, which makes the paper tear off after one or two perforations have passed.
You’d have to figure that the point of this operation is to reduce the use of paper in this particular toilet. Big office building so whatever the effects are, they’re multiplied by like, 10 or 20.
The problem is that it doesn’t work, even worse, the design is counter productive and I believe that this dispenser causes more paper to be used, not less.
The main issue is that the toilet paper is squeezed into an unusable twist. The needful user extracts the sheets, and is left with a coil of twisted paper. You need to keep extracting for this to be useful. Meanwhile the actual use case is counter productive to the intended result.
The only work around is to painstakingly unfold the extracted sheets and render them usable, like normal toilet paper.
The whole thing is like some kind of perfect metaphor for institutional reasoning. Years of research and development, requiring thousands of man hours and possible a few PhD theses in the course of the innovation sequence are dedicated to the production of a final result that in actuality, effects the precise opposite behaviour to the intended result.
There is no follow up. Nobody checks to see what actually happened. The idiots involved move on with their lives and careers, have pasty faced bacon butty eating kids and get fat and gray in the suburbs. It’s a national fucking tragedy.
First world problems.
This is what people say. At least down at the dog walk. You tell them about the toilet paper dispenser, and they laugh and shake their heads. First world problems.
As if I’m capable of having any other kind of a problem.