What is it about organisations and their inability to provide decent toilet paper? Don't tell me it's the cost - I'm sure if you factor in the vandelism and plumbing problems associated with toilet paper dissatisfaction it would work out about the same as just buying Sorbent right across the board!

The toilet paper we had at boarding school was brown and so waxy you would be better served wrapping your lunch in it than trying to do anything that required absorption. And those little tissue box deals that some places have, while the dispenser may be easiier to install and maintain, the paper tears into shreads as it leaves the container. The paper used in the bathrooms where I currently work is in the form of a huge roll, about 8 cm wide and encased in an opaque dispenser that has just the right amount of tension that the paper rips free every 10 cm or so.

I don't know about you, but one piece of 8cm x 10cm boarderline absorbant paper doesn't do it for me. And to make things more annoying, as the paper rips, the dispenser spring leaves the tail end up inside the dispenser to be fished out again and again and again, trying to obtain enough toilet paper to finish my business.

Imprefect toilet paper has always frustrated me.

If it's not soft, white and well perforated, I get grumpy. It has to be easy to dispense and do it's job, dammit!

At boarding school, we complained about the non-absorbant, harsh brown greaseproof toilet-paper they provided us with. The Sisters (Catholic School) listened and said they would replace the paper with something more suitable, after the brown paper had run out. It would take several months to go through the supply. Unfortunately for them, we were determined to go through it as fast as we could and just started flushing the stuff until, because it was as unkind to S-bends as it was to bott-ends, we blocked up all the toilets on the ground floor and the plumbers had to be called in. An expensive exercise for the school, and a fairly fruitless one for us as Nuns are stubborn sons-of-bitches and they just restocked with the cheap brown wax paper for the rest of my days there.

But at least they provided toilet paper. At my first job in Multimedia, my boss seemed to consider toilet paper a luxury and not within his realm of responsibility - we had to supply our own. I'm considering doing that again, but just need to figure out where to stash the stuff so I'm not providing paper for all the female staff of the building.

At least I never had to use a corn cob I guess.

PS: Last week, when walking home from work I took a few photos of possums in Carlton Gardens. One particular possum sat on a fairly low hanging branch for a long time so I got a nice closeup. Because it was so dark when I took the photo, I didn't notice until I got home and downloaded the photo to my computer, that the reason Mr Possum sat there so long was he was in the middle of Number Twos. After some cropping of the image, I saved the possum's dignity and made it suitable to put on Flickr. The original would be perfect to include on this post - but I will not as I'm aware of the delicate sensiblities of one of my regular readers.