On Scott Paper, throwing away the tube, “Chainsaw Al,” and product placement

No tubes!

This was supposed to be about tubleless toilet paper, but it ended up being about something else.

A couple weeks ago, fellow non-paid Times Union community blogger Kevin Marshall tells me he wants to give me a roll of toilet paper. Not just any toilet paper: a new kind of toilet paper that doesn’t have that light cardboard tube inside it.

You may not know a lot about me, dear reader, but one thing you should know is that I never turn down free toilet paper.  I used to steal toilet paper from age 18 up until about six years ago, when I first moved up here. It is my firm belief that toilet paper should be free; if there is an unattached roll of toilet paper in a public bathroom, I will take it and put it in my pocket. The only rule I have for myself is that I never take the last roll.  My thinking is this: we do unspeakable things with toilet paper and to toilet paper. Toilet paper knows us in ways our closest friends and relatives do not.  They have been places we ourselves dare not go. The least we can do in light of this is to take money out this exchange.

Anyway, back to Kevin and the free roll of toilet paper without the tube.  We meet at The Last Drop on Lark Street. The exchange is made. We listen to very loud jazz music and co-tweet the experience in such a way that makes us both look like jerks.  At point point I notice he has several other rolls of Scott roll-less bathroom tissue in his messenger bag. He gives a roll to me. It has no packaging and it’s a little squished. I put it inside my shoulderbag. More jazz is played at louder and louder volumes. We both catch up on email in the upstairs area of “the Drop,” as I will call it just this once, both of us with Scott roll-less bathroom tissue in our murses/man-bags.

I don’t remember exactly why I was given this Scott roll-less bathroom tissue roll, other than I would “review” this product in this space.

I will now do so in the following three sentences. It works. I would use the phrase “thumb’s up,” but it might be misinterpreted as a direction rather than an assessment. Here’s what I can tell you: The paper rolls off cleanly and the texture is adequately soft yet firm enough to make the process painless yet effective.

Let’s go back to the summer of 1994, before I left for New York City to attend graduate school, I worked as a temp for an agency that had an account at Scott Paper‘s headquarters in a place called International Plaza, near the airport.  I would take a regional train from Center City and work in a window-less closet, working the help desk for a couple technicians who were upgrading the computers for the Scott employees. I went home with 2-3 rolls of toilet paper a week.

All of these Scott employees would be laid off by summer’s end. The new CEO of Scott, Albert J. Dunlap, nicknamed “Chainsaw Al” and “Rambo in Pinstripes,” was famous for taking over the operations of a company, selling off its assets, outsourcing its non-essential tasks, and then selling the rest off for a profit. He did all this from his offices in Boca Raton, Florida.

What I remember about the job was taking calls from people regarding the functions of their new Compaq desktop and who knew that their days were limited at the company and yet would not leave the company. Their voices on the phone were always nervous. When word got around that I was a recent college grad writer-type, people asked me to look at their resumes.

Somebody would have, like, six positions on their resume, from the early 1970s on.

“Where are you listing the company?” I’d ask one.

She would point to the very top where the one company for which all these positions would be: Scott Paper. Just about all of these people had worked at the company since they got out of high school of college.

There were other days I would install software for someone while they were at lunch, and I’d be in one of those labs that they show on commercials, where a mysterious blue liquid would act as a stand-in for human material. People really do sit around in lab coats pouring blue liquid on different types of paper, I thought.

There were still other days I would sit around and think that maybe these Scott employees should see the writing on the wall and find a job in a dot-com company or something; it was 1994, after all, and the internet was going to be really big, or so we heard.

By the time I’d left in late August, people were already being escorted by security guards with a box of their belongings, just like in the movies, where somebody had one houseplant, a desk lamp, and some files. “Chainsaw Al” had begun his downsizing.

Scott merged with Kimberly-Clark the next year. The old headquarters building is now for sale.

Categories: General
Daniel Nester

8 Responses

  1. …should we talk about the jazz music?

  2. I just added some details about that music assault.

  3. Esther says:

    I’m still on the TP. Why is it tube-less? Is it so difficult to recycle that thin cardboard (put it with paper!) that they have to go even more ‘natural’ and remove it? Will we next move on to paperless TP; maybe just some air in a bag?

    This has some implications that cause me awkward concern for the future of toilet tissue.

  4. @Esther I am not sure either. It leads to some philosophical questions by roll’s end: What is a roll of toilet paper when it has no tube at the end to mark its ending? Where do the tubes go if not inside these rolls? And: if a roll of toilet paper doesn’t leave a tube in the forest, how does anyone know someone has just taken a dump in the woods?

  5. jim mac says:

    The future of toilet paper is in baby wipes. Face it, live it, rub it. (Hence KC (Huggies) selling off huge tracts of Scott (old school dry wipe). Hell, I even did some research on this for my OM program!

  6. HomeTownGirl says:

    Where will all the hampsters play now?

  7. @HomeTownGirl and how will urban myths about gerbils start without their help.

  8. Tbls says:

    Sounds good on paper…