The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
Something everyone thinks about as they get close to retiring is “What am I going to do with all that free time?” Some people move to the country, others travel the world. Still others make a difference right where they are.
HIGH ROLLERS
One of the perks that come with working in a swanky, well-run high-rise office building in cities like Seattle, Washington, is that you almost never run out of toilet paper. The janitors see to it. Each night they replace the old toilet paper rolls with new ones, whether the old rolls are used up or not. And what happens to the rolls that get replaced? In the old days, the janitors just threw them out, something that drove Allison Delong, the manager of several buildings in Seattle in the 1990s, crazy. She hated to see all that toilet paper going to waste, but what was she going to do with all those partially used rolls?
The problem continued until Allison’s father, Leon Delong, retired in 1999 and found himself with more free time than he knew what to do with. When Allison told him about all the toilet paper rolls that were being thrown away, he offered to collect them and donate them to area food banks. She instructed the janitors in her buildings to set the rolls aside, and every other week Leon would load them into his pickup truck and deliver them to the food banks. They packaged the rolls in groups of three or four and put them out for people who didn’t have enough money to buy toilet paper. “Putting out Leon’s toilet paper is like putting out T-bone steaks,” food bank manager Anthony Brown told the Seattle Times. “If we don’t hold some of it back, it’s gone in an hour.”
ON A ROLL
Seattle’s “Toilet Paper Guy,” as Leon came to be known, added one building after another to his paper route (so to speak) until he was collecting rolls from about a quarter of all the high-rent office buildings in Seattle. He collected some 2,000–3,000 rolls every other week— enough to fill the bed of his pickup truck three times. He kept at it for 15 years, until a bout with pneumonia over the holidays in 2014 forced him to hand over the route to other volunteers. By then he’d saved what he estimates as around one million rolls of toilet paper from the trash and made them available to people in need. “I’m amazed how much this mattered to people,” he told the Seattle Times in 2014. “To me, it was just a nice thing to do. Now it’s my claim to fame. You know, I’m sort of proud of it.”
[Ed. note: Leon Delong died in March of 2015.]
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader. The 28th volume of the series is chock-full of fascinating stories and facts, and comes in both the Kindle version and paper with a classy cloth cover.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Comments (2)
Going to Mars would be a dream come true, for me, and for a lot of other people. While I want to go for the chance to experience and discover things that no one else has before, there certainly would be others who would get a thrill from the danger and the instant fame.
I mean, being one of the first people to set foot on Mars would ensure that you're remembered for all time (more or less).
And with the way the world's going, I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't mind saying goodbye to the wars, diseases, crime, etc. of the Earth. You know, so they can bring all that stuff to Mars. ;)
I'm sure I can accomplish more on Mars in a few years than I am likely to in an entire lifetime on this planet. There are probably other people who feel the same way.
Either way, sign me up!
I say go for it. I'm not one of those people. The thought of not being able to come back home, not being able to go outside and breath in a lung-full of fresh air.. just no...
but if other people are up for it. More power to them! I'll sit at home and watch them on tv religiously! That would be SO damn interesting to watch.
Still. Even knowing that you will find people like that, I'm ill at ease to think of public policy built on the one-way-ticket idea, entrenched in the concept of the disposable human. And don't counter with "that what war's all about": it's one thing to say you might not come home, or even probably not, another to say you WILL not, even to a volunteer. So instead of a suicide bomber's lure of a virgin-laden paradise, you offer academic glory and screen-time? Because it's going to take a few missions at least until things are sorted out enough to the point that life expectancy is "shortened by a little bit" as in this gentleman's softening statement. And they won't be pretty.
Heck most main scientists anyhow only get famous only after they died and without them knowing it. So why not die on Mars and be sure about that place in History?
I'll put aside my opinions on the morality of your suggestion for a moment and concentrate on logistics.
This would conflict with the general idea that once they arrive, the people/explorers/colonists should do useful work- and by that, they mean useful both to themselves and to those of us back on Earth. For that we need scientists, doctors, engineers, and other highly skilled people who are motivated to work hard for little tangible reward.