First off, let me warn you that even though it goes against the stated mission of this site, sometimes ignorance can be bliss. If however you absolutely must know, the “paper towel tube” thing is a SDMB meme that was spawned by this post.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go huff some Soviet era nuclear reactor paint. Hopefully I can kill enough brain cells to lose the memory of reading the linked post again.
What, being an “expert on the physics of squat-sex” didn’t make the meme cut?
If by “demoted”, you mean “blissfully unaware of the seamy underbutthole of this site as well as the human condition”.
btw, do not click that link.
You rang?
Hah!
Oh, it’s better than that, Shakes; give yourself credit. It’s not just a reference to “being fucked”, it’s a reference to “being fucked for reasons that only make sense to a crazy person”. You were PTT’d, indeed.
Well put, my friend. Well put.
Well, it has now.
As the guy who was given the task of “training my boss to do the job I’m qualified for” more than once you have my sympathy.
The term “paper-towel tubed” in a business context refers to a person who is employed but adds nothing to the equation- as if you could put a marble in one end of the tube, and it just rolls out the other end, unchanged and with nothing added. I deal with a person like that at one of my client companies. She’s utterly useless; things would get accomplished so much faster if I could just speak directly to the people who can have a direct impact on the work, but everything has to go through her.
Actually, she’s worse than a paper-towel tube, because usually she leaves out some critical piece of information when she’s passing it on from me to the others, or vice versa.
But if you’ve become a paper-towel tube, it may just be because your employers feel that you bring nothing to the game*.
Too late for me. 
I don’t even know what to say. That ranks up there somewhere between the racists and that guy who tried to justify fucking kids.
Just curious: do you have a cite for the use of the term in that sense or did you just make it up? Nothing wrong with making up idioms, of course, but it would be interesting to know if anybody actually uses this phrase to mean that.
(And no, I’m afraid “oh yeah, the people I work with use that expression all the time” doesn’t count as a cite for this purpose.)
In the meantime, I agree with HoD and others here that Shakes’s version of the idiom is spot-on.
I thought that was the guy trying to justify fucking kids…
Oh, wait, you meant cesario…
You could just not train him well and wait for the inevitable chaos
It was. Very.
Why wait? Actively undermine him. Go into the database and screw up the work he does do right. Just don’t get caught.
Dear Straight Dope,
I just got an awesome job. My friend, who recently took over a management position called me out of the blue and said he had an opening for me. I was so excited, but there’s a slight problem.
I think the guy who’s training me is a bit clueless. On the one hand, he’s this really great guy, very smart and all … but I think he’s a bit, well, slow. The way he’s showing me how to do things just doesn’t seem right. I don’t want to lose my job in a couple weeks from incompetence (I’ve got three kids to feed, a special needs dog, a wife in a coma, my house is about to go into foreclosure, and I need a kidney transplant), so I’m inclined to go to HR and tell them about it. But I like this guy and don’t want to screw him over. It’s just that since I’m new to the situation and didn’t do anything to him, I don’t want to get fucked over myself.
Also, he has this weird fetish for older women that’s creeping me out a bit. He keeps making oblique sexual references to “Rosie,” the ex-spokeswoman for Bounty.
So, Dopers, what do I do? I was really happy for the opportunity, don’t want to screw over someone who did me no wrong, but I need to do something.
And to think some say Myth Busters is running out of material to work with…
So sticking my dick in a paper towel tube is just as bad as me being a racist?
So when us neighborhood kids would stick paper towel tubes* on our wangs and run around sword-fighting we were on par with monsters wanting to fuck kids?
Also at first glance I saw “kicking kids” instead of “fucking kids” and I thought, “Jesus Christ! We can’t kick kids anymore? What is the PC bullshit world coming to.”
*The kids who used paper towel tubes were idiots because I used a wrapping paper tube and won all the fights.
:p, but just in case anybody reading this is genuinely confused about the subject:
The poster whose post Monkey linked to above was using the “stick your dick in a paper towel tube” thought experiment as part of an argument for discrediting certain accusations of child molestation. The combination of pigheaded willful ignorance and callous smugness that said poster displayed in the process of making that argument is what provoked comparisons with more conventional forms of vileness.
Yeah.
First time I read that post back in February I laughed. I thought, “Seriously? Seriously, you want people to go squat-hump a paper towel tube to “prove” you’re right?”