Buggered if I know…

Here it is: the next in the occasional series of posts on the subject of bogroll holders.

Only two days ago, I came across a strange phenomenon. This time it was at our local, relatively posh, leisure centre.

The loo in the female changing rooms upstairs has a LTRD which has, in the past, bitten me. Honest!

On this occasion, when I went into the little cubicle where the bog is, there were tiny shreds of paper on the floor along the length of the wall. It looked as if a mouse had been hunting for nesting materials, gathered this lot up and then decided to reject it all. I couldn’t really understand why it was all there … not until I tried to persuade the LTRD to let me have some bog paper.

This dispenser is so cunningly designed that you can see the bog paper inside, through the transparent walls, but you just can’t get at it. It has a spring-loaded slidey bit which you push across, I think, to get access to the second bogroll once the first one has run out. Being the kind of “let’s see how this works” type of person that I am, I once tried to see how it worked exactly. And that was when it bit me.

On last Saturday there were two almost complete bogrolls inside, but they were both wedged in sooooooo tightly that you couldn’t persuade either of them to turn around. Judging by my experience, all one could achieve was to get what in German is called “eine Prise” — the amount you can hold between your fingertips — dunno if there’s an English word for this. So, the tiny shreds of bogpaper on the ground were the result of numerous fruitless attempts to get hold of sufficient paper to be useful — a vain hope since this LTRD was clearly not going to give in easily.

Naturally enough (at least I think it was a natural reaction) I started down the “what’s the point” route again. But seriously, I ask you, what is the point of putting in a dispenser that doesn’t dispense? The response is, obviously, buggered if I know.

And then I remembered another strange occurrence, which I tend to think of as the revenge of the bogrolls. It happened like this …

There I was, not even thinking about the lockable-ness (or not) of the toilet roll dispenser in the loo I was visiting, when the one on the wall suddenly pinged open and the two bogrolls from inside jumped out and attacked me. I don’t think I’d even touched the blessed thing.

You will no doubt be fascinated to know that this toilet roll dispenser had been inspected too, in January 2004. Contrary, therefore, to my most recent post on this subject, the revised legislation on inspection was introduced later than 1992.

I can’t actually remember where this revenge attack happened, although it was less than a week ago. It was definitely a pub, or hotel. But where exactly? BIIK