Monday, March 5, 2012

Change for an Older Guy

I love using Bounty paper towels.  I have used this brand of paper towels for many years.  They are very useful for many things around the house, or in my case, around my condo.  I would recommend them to anyone.

Then one day they started offering paper towels that you could tear in half sizes as well as whole-size paper towels.  Why would I want those kind of paper towels?  I don't want a paper towel with a perforation in the middle that makes it easy to tear in half.  Why would I use a half-sized paper towel?  I have always used full-size paper towels to cleanup the spills that I always make.  However, Bounty was not giving me much of choice.  All I could see on the Bounty shelves were the paper towels you could easily tear in half.  What was I to do.

But I started to find uses for the half-sized paper towels.  I put the spoon I use to stir my cup of coffee on a half-sized paper towel.  I put my spatula or my big spoon I use when I am cooking on a half-sized paper towel.  After cooking bacon in my microwave, I clean the bottom of my microwave with a half-sized paper towel.  I even use  a one and one-half paper towel when I clean the white board of a classroom.  When I use a half-sized paper towel, and it does the job of a whole paper towel, I am saving paper and money by doing so.  I have grown to like this kind of paper towel.  I would not be happy if this kind of paper towel went away.

Too my horror, it looks like the unthinkable has happened.  A couple of weeks ago when I went to the paper towel aisle in the grocery store, and all I saw on the Bounty shelves were the full-size paper towels only.  The half-sized paper towels were no where to be seen.  My favorite paper towels were gone.

Why did this terrible thing happen?  I don't go to the grocery store every day to see if my favorite paper towels are back (maybe I should).  Maybe they were out of those kind of paper towels temporarily and had to fill the shelves with the full-size paper towels.  Maybe they were not making enough money on the half-sized paper towels and figured they could make more money on the full-sized type.  It seems so cruel to get someone used to using a product in a new way, and then ripping that away.  I have become dependent on using half-sized paper towels.  I miss them.  I am sad that they seem to be gone from my life.

I know you are thinking now that I have really flipped.  He is not really upset over a paper towel, is he?  No, I am not that upset.  However, the older you are, the harder it is to accept change.  I had accepted change when I started to like using half-sized paper towels.  Now I have to go back to using the old-styled paper towels, especially when I was saving money and paper using the new-styled ones?  Oh, what a cruel world this can be!