“Hand towels embody evil.”

Useless Towel Rack Percentage (UTRP) – The percentage of time your child puts the hand towel back on the rack after using it. National average – 5%. National average where it ends up on the floor – 92.5%

 

Pointless Cleaning Object Ratio (PCOR) – The measure of how clean your towels are after they get out of the wash (100 is fully clean) to that of 24 hours later (0 is total filth). National Average – Double infinity.

 

There is nothing more pitiful than giving up and still trying after the fact. It is better to just let it go and accept it. Save yourself and your time and move on, but parents cannot do that. They trudge on, lethargically picking up things that are left in the aftermath of unheeded reminders that were said enough times to make us hoarse. 

 

Our bathroom floors house hand towels. Those towels that are not for your face, not for your entire body, but the ones that rest near the sink to dry one’s hands after you wash them. 

 

It seems illogical to dry our newly clean hands on towels that have been on the floor for six consecutive days, but logic has nothing to do with it. 

 

I get it, the average height of our children is 3 foot 5 inches. Everything is bigger than them. The towel rack should be lower so that they don’t have to use a stool to put them back. The towel rack should not be cruelly made of polished glass, so that every towel slips right back on the floor. The rack should not be welded so close to the wall that you can’t slide it on the other side of the bar and pull it through. 

 

But we all know, even if we welded the bar two feet off of the ground with tactified bars with clips to hold them, they would end up on the floor. 

 

This is the awful joke of gravity, especially with our 3-foot tall daughter. She leaves a trail of towels, mostly from giving up at putting them back. The fact that these towels simmer at the base of a toilet bowl that has been missed from wayward urine streams has no baring on the decision-making process of someone who is in a rush to get back to her previous essential task of twirling her hair. 

 

There is no telling what microscopically adorns the bathroom floor. However, I am confident, I do not want my hand towels to pick up mystery matter so I can ultimately wipe it on myself after I thought I cleaned my hands. It is a bad sign to enter a bathroom to wash your hands and the first thing you need to do is pick up the hand towel you are about to use.

 

Do they bother to really try to put them back? I am guessing, no. If they did, they would end up in the vicinity of the towel rack, right? Gravity works downward and there is no wind in our bathroom of which I am aware. So how does the towel miss the rack by 4 feet? From lack of effort, from a total disregard of hand towel etiquette, I say.

 

I know there are solutions by some wise parents out there. They use a fixed towel, bolted into the side of the cabinet. They use some disposable concept, willing to over-pollute the Earth to save themselves from the inevitable back surgery coming from all of the bending required to pull the hand towel out from behind the bathroom garbage can. 

 

So I want my time back. I want my back back. I want to wash my hands and not exit the bathroom infested with Hep-B because the towels were not respected. 

 

I know they are really short right now, and it is easier to just drop everything on the floor. Since I have no plans to have air jets coming out of the bathroom floors to levitate everything they drop, or plans to renovate the floors to be made out of congealed hand sanitizer, I think they just need to step it up, figuratively and literally to put those towels back on the rack in peace.

 

- Doug Glanville