I once went a year without buying toilet paper

Well, in all honesty, it may have been a little longer, but who counts days?

In the fall of 2002 my company asked me to go work at our Chicago plant for 2 or 3 months. Turns out I spent a year in Chicago that winter, but that’s a whole other story… or three.

I was living in an Extended Stay America. The room was pretty basic. Bed, bath, TV, desk, and small kitchenette. As an extended stay place – more than a motel; less than a hotel – they didn’t have daily room service and there was no one at the desk 24 hours a day. I’d often get back from work after the desk staff had left for the day. The weekly tidying up they did included the basic cleaning and restocking toilet paper, but only if you didn’t already have at least most of a roll left.

It turns out that what I consider most of a roll and what the cleaning staff considered most a roll wasn’t the same thing. On Saturdays I’d make it a point to get down to the front desk to ask for an extra roll whether I needed it or not. Within a month, I had 5 or 6 extra rolls stowed away in a drawer in my room.

I also started stashing the new roll they left when the arbitrary “low” limit on the roll in the bathroom prompted them to leave a new one. I had learned to keep the one I used in a drawer by the crapper rather than replace the one on the TP holder. That way they always left a new one.

Between getting a roll every Saturday and stowing away what they restocked (less what I actually used) over the course of about 6 months I had filled almost two full drawers in my room with toilet paper.

When my stint was over and I was finally ready to leave Chicagoland, I had a very large duffel bag very full of toilet paper (I bought the cheapest, largest one I could find at Walmart just to pack it all up).

This bag accompanied me on my 10 hour drive back to NW Arkansas in the spring of 2003.

It wasn’t until about a year later that I finally ran out and had to go down the toilet paper aisle when doing some shopping.

Those of you toilet tissue connoisseurs reading this may say, “yeah, but was it good quality paper?”, and my response… for the price, it couldn’t be beat.