The Toilet Paper Apocalypse (a poem)

Nice one.

"Liked".

I liked the poem!! But I'm not on Twitter and couldn't give you the "like" that matters...

mccardey said:

(which might only be an Australian thing, because honestly who reacts to a potential respiritory pandemic by panic-buying toilet paper? Only the Aussies. We are a weird mob, really)

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Uh, it's the same here in Japan. No TP, no tissues, instant noodles & bottled water (why water????) are beginning to disappear. We still have rice, so it's fine. As long as there is rice, we're fine. I guess

The scariest thing about the TP situation imo is that it gives a sobering preview of what to expect from our fellow humans in (probably imminent) times of actual apocalyptic threat.

I don't understand why do they buy so much toilet paper.

fenyo said:

I don't understand why do they buy so much toilet paper.

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Think about exactly how much you use during the day. Multiply for the week, then multiply again for the household.

For one person, a pack of 10 - 12 is good for approximately 1 - 2 months. Depending on what you use it for: just the toilet, or are they also blow-your-nose tissues? What else?

And psychologically, that's one of the necessities that you can stock for years.

mccardey said:

We started on water today, in FNQ, apparently. Helix? Do you know why?

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I haven't seen any panic buying of water up here, just a shortage of rice. But the rice has now been restocked, apparently. So I don't know what's going on. It's all too bizarre to comprehend tbh.

But hoarding bottled water is a Thing in some parts of the country and I do not understand it. If, for some unfathomable reason, they need to stockpile water, why don't they just buy some 20L plastic containers -- cheap as effin' chips -- and fill them from the tap?

People seem to have lost any ability to assess situations and plan accordingly.

Save your good selves, of course.

Tocotin said:

Uh, it's the same here in Japan. No TP, no tissues, instant noodles & bottled water (why water????) are beginning to disappear.

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Bottled water in case you can't boil the tap water, or you don't want to touch a public faucet, e.g., public bathrooms. Not that you need to touch them these days, 'cos of the infrared sensor. But if you don't have it?

Also, take a small bottle with you, a pack of wafer soap, and you can wash your hands with soap instead of using the more abrasive alcohol-based hand sanitiser.

mccardey said:

Why do you need to boil tapwater during a (potential) respiratory flu pandemic? And if you do need to, and you can afford to buy lots and lots of bottled water, and for some reason you don't want to just boil water, why not invest in a steripen, which at least will be useful when you go camping?

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The most I can think of is the impurities in the water and the fact that faucet interiors aren't exactly bacteria free, which doesn't help your immune system, regardless of the fact that chemicals are in the water already to keep it "clean".

For me personally, it's a force of habit to boil the water before drinking: Where I grew up, the water couldn't be drunk straight from the faucet, even with filtering. There wasn't a steripen, either. So, boiling it was. And though you could probably drink the water straight from the tap now, this habit has stuck since. There's also a psychological affect, too -- stress/worry relief.

Isn't that what tea is for? To give you something to fiddle with while waiting for the water to boil?

And, yes, everyone's hoarding TP apparently, but I have heard no accounts of the shelves being stripped of women's sanitary products. Is the media just too delicate to mention such things, or is it only men who are over-reacting? Or are women assuming that this epidemic they are prepping for will be over in a month?

mccardey said:

Oh, they're buying them here. Usually it's three huskey men in van, stocking up (one assumes) for All The Women In The World.

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Or being entrepreneurs...

mccardey said:

Oh, they're buying them here. Usually it's three huskey men in van, stocking up (one assumes) for All The Women In The World.

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I invested in some washable sanitary pads last month. Very glad now. Just need enough laundry powder to wash properly!

Or, all the women in the army unit, ship, boarding school, shelter, nursing home, brothel, or jail. Good lads, nonetheless, although I'll bet the reason they travel in packs is that one man is usually awkward about buying that sort of thing, let alone vast quantities.

As for 'entrepreneurs', let us remember the sad story of a friend of my dad's who went across the border to where fireworks were cheap and legal, and stocked up, as Hallowe'en was coming up. He put them in his shed, and left them until he heard the sound of the first few fire-crackers in the park.
"A-ha!" he says, "Time to start selling". He goes out to his shed, discovers the door broken open, and the kids in the park are playing with his fireworks!

I had to go to Costco the other day to repair a flat tire, and the panic buying was in full swing. Lots of beans and rice... but I needed to pick up some charcoal and I realized NOBODY was buying charcoal... I only saw one other person with a bag. Now this is New Orleans. We lose power every time a butterfly farts. If there's an outage and the electric company is understaffed, an outage could easily last for days, at least.

I KNOW there are lots of houses like mine, with electricity but no gas. So if they're planning for an emergency (and around here, the most common emergency is a hurricane, which ALWAYS brings a loss of power) how exactly do people plan to cook their mountains of dry beans and rice?

I just saw a headline of an article that some family accidentally ordered twelve years worth of toilet paper. God, what a nightmare.

Here in New England region of the USA, we KNOW what to stockpile, being well-acquainted with with the concept of sheltering in place during blizzards, etc.
Everybody heads to the nearest (six or seven) supermarkets and stocks up on bread, eggs and milk. Affectionately known as the "French toast run" it guarantees a large supply of perishable food in the household that no one ever actually seems to eat, even in the unusual circumstance of the power staying on.

Yesterday, while waiting for my annual state car inspection to be done, I innocently wandered into the supermarket across the street. The lines for the cash registers were enormous. The shelves were close to bare, not just of things like hand sanitizer and lysol sprays and cleaners and protective masks, and portable wipes and detergents and sterile gloves, but also toilet paper, paper towels, bottled water, kleenex, which are at least useful, and don't spoil. Also stripped were the shelves of cookies, chips, candy, canned soups and other canned foods, processed cheese, crackers, dried fruit and nuts, which at least are some form of nutritive sustenance that doesn't require cooking and is not all that spoilable.

And, of course, every single cart had cartons of eggs, gallons of milk and multiple loaves of bread.

FWIW, Jim Wright recommends that if you can’t buy toilet paper but can buy flour, you buy flour and bake soft tortillas... I don’t think he was entirely kidding...

starrystorm said:

I just saw a headline of an article that some family accidentally ordered twelve years worth of toilet paper. God, what a nightmare.

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They could sell it on eBay?

FWIW, Liz’s parents live in assisted living, and apparently are running low on toilet paper. Her usual response to “we’re running out of X” is to find X on Amazon, click, it’s shipped to them. Yesterday, there was no toilet paper to be had on Amazon...

Tazlima said:

I KNOW there are lots of houses like mine, with electricity but no gas. So if they're planning for an emergency (and around here, the most common emergency is a hurricane, which ALWAYS brings a loss of power) how exactly do people plan to cook their mountains of dry beans and rice?

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Good move buying charcoal!

Panic-buying doesn’t usually leave much oxygen leftover for the brain’s rational cells.

We’ve got some charcoal on hand, and a couple of cords of dry firewood, a wood-fired outdoor grill, a woodstove inside that (in a pinch) we can cook on (I did this a decade ago during a prolonged winter power outage), and a kerosene stove folded up in the basement with jugs of fuel. There’s a fair pile of canned and dry food in the basement, as well as (if we don’t lose power for days) a full chest freezer.

We’ve also got a potable water source if we lose power for the well pump, albeit, not a convenient one.

But, I don’t really expect things to get that dire. I just always stockpile because it’s comforting. Maybe I was Mormon in a previous life?