It is practical to make sure you have enough of a necessary item when you expect to be quarantined for two or more weeks. It is not practical for a single person to grab eight packages of 12-roll toilet paper, leaving none for other people. You can stock up smartly by doing crude calculations and buy only what you think you will need. Heck, if you have no toilet paper, jump in the shower and grab your ankles. It’s cheaper and cleaner. After two months of this virus, mostly without containment measures, 0.0023% of the world’s population have been infected. I don’t think there will a disruption of essential services like water or grocery stores. Have someone not sick buy your groceries and drop them at your door.
Yeah, and put my feet in shitty water. You betcha. :rolleyes: Not to mention having to disinfect the tub before I ever took another bath.
Seriously, I’d use my junk mail as TP before I went there.
I said shower, not bath. There would be no water to put your feet in. The filth would run down the drain with the water. Sure, you’d have to disinfect after, what, a 2-minute operation, but this isn’t routine operation, just temporary emergency procedures if your sick, quarantined, and out of toilet paper. Who has two or more weeks of junk mail, even if it was effective at wiping your ass? It usually gets immediately thrown away. And what do you do with that dirty junk mail? If you use something you can’t flush down the toilet, you’re probably going to have to disinfect something anyway. You could use t-shirts, but that could get expensive and what are you going to do with the dirty t-shirts?
Customer: Do you have any bleach left?
Boss: Yes we have some here (shows bleach).
Customer: That’s scented. I need the original.
Boss: This one over here is unscented.
Customer: It needs to say “original.”
Boss: This one is just bleach.
Customer: It needs to say “Original.” The kind you can drink.
Boss: ??? I don’t think you should drink any bleach.
Customer: Yes, you put a few drops in your water and it cleanses it. It is on the internet.
Boss: I don’t think you should drink any bleach.
Actually, using plain bleach to sanitize drinking water is real, according to my emergency prep info, but this guy doesn’t sound like he’d get the amount right.
2 drops per quart, for those of you keeping score.
Yes, a few drops of bleach in water storage containers.
I still have a few rolls of TP but yesterday I experimented with using facial tissue and paper towels and then bagging, not flushing. I happen to have (long story) a bajillion plastic bags of the type used to bag newspapers for delivery. I put them next to the wastebasket in the bathroom. Really not as distasteful as I anticipated.
RH, pul-eeeze check those bags before using!
Back in my working days, I brought my AM newspaper in with me every day. I’d read the paper, then pass it along to anyone. And I kept the bags, because you never know…
Without going into detail, I had a tummy upset, and didn’t think I’d make it to the restroom in time. So, I grabbed one of my saved newspaper bags and quickly urped.
The bag had a hole in it.
:smack:
Check your bags. Please.
~VOW
Yes, I do! I learned that lesson when I was using them to collect my dog’s poop when I was walking her. My dog has passed on but that is why I have so many of those bags. I knew they’d come in handy some day!
I did a grocery run last Wednesday before Trump’s speech, assuming panic buying would explode afterwards. Kroger was actually quieter than usual and there was no line, no waiting to check out. I bought enough for a couple weeks. Today I decided that two weeks was probably not going to be enough so I decided to go back. There is only one confirmed infection in Memphis (brought in from out of state) and that’s from over a week ago, so I figured this might be the last “safe” opportunity.
Kroger was about as crowded as normal but folks were buying a LOT more stuff. Of course, there was no TP, produce was picked over to the point that I just skipped it, meat section was thinned out and canned food was sparse. I got a lot of shelf-stable stuff that I don’t normally buy but I should be good for a month or more now. When I got home, I realized I didn’t have my tuna pouches (they were out of cans). I was bagging my stuff, don’t know how I missed it. I’m not going back for it, though.
I cannot wrap my head around the scenario the people panic buying TP in urban areas are preparing for.
Here is the scenario:
- Somehow the supply of TP will get disrupted.
- Water will keep flowing.
- The sewers will keep functioning fine.
- Somehow they have enough food to need to defecate. In urban areas this means stores have to be open and supplied daily (except for TP)
What bizarre combination of events would cause this?
How are they hoarding what they somehow see as a primary need while I’m picking up 4 croissants for my breakfast?
I get hoarding ammo, I get hoarding stocks like rice, pasta or canned stuff; I’m definitely not doing that, I’m not even overstocking on medicine for my special needs son. Still, I get the prepper idea, but TP? LOL.
In stores here the TP shelves have been empty for days, not because there isn’t enough supply, but because the store employees can’t fill them quick enough. Distribution centers are still fully stocked, you can order TP online, just the shelves in stores are empty. What the fuck is wrong with people? What are they afraid of?
Toilet paper was stocked in our store overnight, but I guess the word got around because everything in that large section was gone by 10am this morning. My folks at the CS desk answer the constantly ringing phone and then after listening to the question they invariably reply we do not have TP and hand sanitizer and do not know when we will get those items. Then the phone rings again. Rinse and repeat.
I feel for everyone because there is such panic because no one knows what will happen next. It is not like snow or even hurricanes where you can get supply from somewhere else to help the area with the shortage and there is recent history to show that everything soon works out OK. When the whole country is out of stock there are no easy answers.
Back in the 70s I had a professor who was a Russian emigrant, who liked to tell us stories on how soft life in America was compared to what she’d experienced.
One of them was about how every Russian kept as sizable a wad of cash on them as they could manage at all times. Whenever you saw a line of people forming in the downtown area, you’d join the queue automatically. It meant something normally rare and hard to obtain had come into stock, and you must try your best to score some of it.
Food, liquor, shoes, clothing? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, you bought some. You either needed it yourself, or one of your friends or family did, or at the very least, it would serve as a trade good to maybe get you something else that you needed.
I’m just waiting to see the ads on Craig’s List. Wanted: Purell. Can Trade: 24 pack of Charmin Ultra.
It makes sense to me. It’s FOMO (fear of missing out) or FOSP (fear of stupid people).
I don’t want to take a dump without toilet paper. I’ve got a spray bottle but I still need some toilet paper. I don’t want to use newspaper or most other substitutes because they’re not flushable. I’m not using my bare hand, and I’m not dumping non-flushable “used” material in a garbage bag. I am aware that humans obviously had to take care of these matters before the invention of paper and running water, but I really don’t feel like living like a caveman right now. (The homeless have this problem, only far more severely. Not enough public toilets! And those probably have no toilet paper now.)
I want to go to the store and buy a normal, rational supply of toilet paper. Maybe one week’s worth, as I usually shop once per week. Unfortunately, people have panicked and there’s no supply left, and “enterprising people” foresaw this and bought toilet paper to resell at higher prices online. Since I don’t know when the t-p is shipped, I can’t predict the best time to get some, and hanging out around the grocery store like a zombie waiting for the shipment is also stupid. I doubt I could buy any on Ebay or Kijiji, even at inflated prices, because people already bought all of that. I might literally be unable to buy any toilet paper for the duration of the crisis, whatever that duration is. Which means that if I happened to walk into a grocery store within minutes of the t-p shipment, I would replicate the idiots and buy a lot of it!
If nobody had been an idiot or “enterprising”, I wouldn’t have to be an idiot either.
Oh lordy. Where to even start?
You didn’t say “if you’ve got a shower other than the usual bath/shower combo.”
But thanks for noting belatedly that many (most?) of us should disregard this advice.
The cottage we vacation at every summer has showers that are shower-only. So even though my current residence has only the bath/shower combos, I have some experience with the other kind. IME, the water doesn’t miraculously head straight down the drain after contact with one’s body. I wouldn’t want to use that shower again without disinfecting first. Hell, I’d want to disinfect my feet as I got out of the shower.
What I’m saying is that even compared to other emergency procedures suggested in this thread, this is extremely gross.
I wouldn’t need to start with two weeks of saved-up junk mail; I get regular deliveries of it every day except Sunday.
Throw it in a trash bag to throw away, as others have suggested one do after wiping with paper towels. Maybe get a Diaper Genie.
You disinfect your trash?
Whatever, dude. :rolleyes:
Man, this one’s easy.
- Water will be the last public service to go. As long as we have functioning local governments, they will do what they can to keep the water system operational. If water goes, it means everything’s gone.
(FWIW, people are also stocking up on bottled water too.)
-
Sewers should keep on working as long as water continues to flow downhill. The treatment plants may stop functioning, and if you live near one you may wish you didn’t, but the sewage will get there.
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Substantial quantities of food take up less room than you’d think. Our kitchen pantry is a 2’ x 2’ cabinet, and it’s got enough canned goods, rice, pasta, peanut butter, etc. to live off of for probably close to two months. That’s not the result of stocking up; that’s how it is normally.
Most people have some storage area of a similar size. Might be a lazy Susan, might be a shelf in the basement, whatever.
4a) People are also stocking up on food. I’ve only been in a few stores lately, but most of them have had a distinct absence of bread. In my local non-chain grocery store this morning, there was no chicken at all. There was a big hole in the mac n’ cheese section. There were some curious holes on the canned-goods aisle. Milk was in short supply. So ISTM that people are anticipating the possibility of shortages of multiple things, not just TP.
4b) So part of this is just perceptual. You may not notice the four packs of ground beef and chicken, the ten cans of beans, the five boxes of pasta and the other five boxes of mac, because that doesn’t look that out of the ordinary. It’s the two 12-packs of TP that catch your eye, because they’re BIG. The same cart says they’re worried about the continuing availability of both food **and **TP, but you only see the TP.
4c) Which is another reason why most people don’t have much TP around in the first place: there’s room for only so much of it in the bathroom cabinet, and there’s often no other good place for it. So you buy a pack of it every trip or two to the store, and everything’s fine. Not like when you buy eight cans of chicken broth, and expect that to be enough of it for a month or two.
So if you have six weeks’ worth of canned goods, but only two weeks’ worth of TP, and you’re worried that everyone from slaughterhouse workers to cannery workers to truckers to grocery store clerks might get seriously ill, what do you need to buy more of?
Exactly. And nothing at all in that scenario is bizarre.
I think it’s more the strangeness of people buying a year’s worth of TP.
Man, we got a squeamish crowd here. Having two kids and cloth diapering, I’m used to being elbow deep in shit.
Seriously, though, a good portion of the world gets by fine with a pitcher of water and a hand. I wouldn’t even think twice about cleaning my shitter in the shower (and it would be cleaner than using TP anyway.)
The weak and squeamish die first. Just sayin’. Push comes to shove, just cut a hole in a lawn chair and park it over a lawn sprinkler.