Annual Procurement

I had a problem with buying toilet paper. Not using it—carrying it home. The package was too large to hide in a bag, and walking through the street with it made me strangely self-conscious. Everyone needed toilet paper, and everyone knew everyone else needed toilet paper. None of this helped.

So I designed a system: I would buy almost a year’s supply at once, very early in the morning. The logic was perfect in the way only bad logic can be perfect. If carrying one package through the neighborhood felt embarrassing, the obvious solution was to carry a ridiculous amount of it while reducing the number of witnesses.

I never questioned the first assumption. Asking why anybody should care would have turned the matter into a psychological problem, and psychological problems were difficult. Logistics were easier. I could choose the hour, reduce shopping frequency, increase inventory, and minimize public exposure. In another context, this might have been called supply-chain planning.

The funniest part was that the strategy made the thing I wanted to hide much more visible. One ordinary pack might have attracted no attention at all. A person walking home at an unusually early hour with enough toilet paper for a small office had at least the possibility of becoming interesting. Still, the streets were quiet, and that mattered to me.

The shops had only recently opened. People were going to work, buses were beginning to fill, and I was conducting my annual household procurement before most respectable social activity had begun. I do not remember the brand or exactly how many packages there were. The old note preserves only the important scale: roughly enough for a year.

Apparently I had decided that embarrassment should be handled like an unpleasant medical appointment—better to endure a larger dose less often. Today the anxiety is harder to understand than the solution, and I could easily imagine walking down the same street with the same package without thinking about it.

But that would miss the person in the memory. He cared, and for reasons that were perfectly real to him, carrying toilet paper in daylight felt exposed. So he woke early and solved the problem with quantity.

A small social discomfort appeared, and he built infrastructure.