House Foes - Part 2

July 23, 2007


I have a propensity towards taking note of obscure details that no one else could be bothered to pay attention to. For example, when I first moved in this term, I took a quick survey of the bathroom and noted the types and brands of products Ajax and Tobermory use. I also noted the amount that was left in each bottle, jar and tube, for no real reason other than the fact that I can't help but take note of these trivial things.

Now, three months after I moved in, I noticed that I look at the bathroom and see pretty much the same scene.

1. The same, less-than-half-left bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body wash. I don't actually know the brands but I'm pretty sure they haven't invented self-replenishing products yet, or ones that will keep the user clean for extensive amounts of time (in the range of days).
2. The same, thoroughly-squeezed tubes of toothpaste with just enough toothpaste to last the rest of the week still sit on the counter. Yes, that's right. It's likely that those tubes have been used three times, at most, over these three months. These are normal brands of toothpaste now (Crest, Colgate) so I know for sure that they don't have super cleaning powers.
3. The same, filthy, smelly towel sits on the rack beside the hand towel that I now avoid as if it were the plague. Think about it for a minute, would you? The point of taking a shower is to get clean (okay, maybe not so evident for Ajax and Tobermory). The idea of using a towel after is to dry your body off, while still keeping you clean. Now, if you use an obviously dirty towel after your shower, doesn't that make you dirty again? Not to mention, it makes the bathroom smell of mould and fungus for the next person.

What doesn't make sense to me is that they have all these products in the bathroom, indicating that on some level, they'd like to be clean. But, based on the unchanging amounts of product that still remains in the bathroom after three months, it doesn't seem that they act on this desire. Don't they feel dirty? At all? They obviously have a very high dirt-tolerance threshold or an uncanny neglect for hygiene.

Stay tuned for more to come on the current state of our unit...

UPDATE (July 25): based on the picture, how long do you think you would have been able to last with the amount of product there?