Toilet paper hoarding amid coronavirus fears is too much
Forget COVID-19, the true pandemic taking hold of Australia is the hysteria turning ordinarily sane people into crazed bog roll collecting monsters, writes Amelia Saw. Has it really come to this?
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It was the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 and across the land, tensions were running high as Australians stockpiled their homes with loo roll supplies.
Shelves were bare, a knife was brandished, someone was tasered and bottoms everywhere lamented the golden days when dunny rolls roamed free and two-ply was plentiful.
As such, my hopes of returning from a trip to Aldi TP-in-hand were few, but as I made my way down the fluoro-lit aisles there before me sat one, perfectly wrapped, four-pack of glorious toilet tissue.
Its plastic packaging glinted under the supermarket lights – beckoning me, enticing me, calling me hither.
One step. Two. Closer I moved, my eyes fixed on its stout curvaceous form.
Three step. Four. Ever-closer I edged.
Five step. Six. It was almost in reach!
Seven step, eight …
“Hey! Hey, what are you doing?! That’s mine!” I wailed as a surly female officer-worker suddenly plucked the last-remaining pack from the shelf, stuffing it into her trolley.
“I don’t think so,” she snorted triumphantly, pushing her way past me and my empty clutching hands.
My jaw hung open. I didn’t know what to say. In a civilised society, has it really come to this?
Returning home with a couple of packets of cheap Christmas napkins as sad substitute, the news confirmed my worst fear.
The true pandemic taking hold of Australia was not an imminent outbreak of coronavirus but a hideous hysteria that’s turning ordinary Aussies into crazed bum-wad collecting monsters.
Have I missed something? Does having toilet paper stashed in every drawer, nook and cranny somehow protect you from coronavirus?
Are people planning to spend their time in isolation dressing up as toilet paper mummies?
Admittedly, the threat of mass illness with potentially fatal consequences is scary, but what’s scarier is the gusto with which we seem to be losing all sense of reality and adopting a kill-or-be-killed herd mentality … over toilet paper.
There are reports of stampedes, knives being pulled.
Has no one considered the roughly four billion people around the world who have survived for centuries – and continue to do so — without toilet paper?
Ancient Romans used tersoriums (essentially a natural sponge on a stick) and they still managed to invent sanitation, grid-based cities and Roman numerals.
Their Ancient Greek neighbours wiped with stones, not Sorbent, yet they still invented the concept of democracy and produced Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine.
And the Mayans, believed to have invented elastic, chocolate and, of course, the Mayan calendar, did so all while drying their doo-doo with corn husks.
Sure, there may be more luxurious lavatorial experiences but let it be known, in the great regrets of the dying, no one has ever said: “I wish I’d owned more toilet paper.”
Amelia Saw is a journalist with News Corp Australia.
Originally published as Toilet paper hoarding amid coronavirus fears is too much