Sunday, March 30, 2008

A stroke of good fortune?

A few weeks ago my roommate bought four rolls of Seventh Generation paper towels in an effort to be a better citizen of the earth or whatever. Sounds great and all, and I generally like their products. But their paper towels are awful. They're basically not absorbent at all. I might as well just use regular paper. It's all well and good to be using recycled paper products but what's the point if they don't work? Is the object to frustrate people into using cloth instead?

Anyway, today a bottle of laundry detergent fell out of our utilities closet and the cap broke, spilling over half a bottle of ultra-concentrated on the floor of our hall. Using regular cloth towels would have been the fastest way to clean that up but we figured that the towels would take forever to get clean and the washing machine in our laundry room might end up sudsing so much that it would end up being like a scene in a sitcom. Much to our delight, we ended up using an entire roll of paper towels mopping up the spill. I then mopped that area of the floor three times, wiping it dry between each mopping in an attempt to get rid of extra detergent. So I now have one less roll of crappy paper towels and a (mostly) clean floor.

Except for this lovely place where the tile has broken away. That's basically a lost cause. Fortunately its mostly in the closet so in all likelihood no one (human or feline) will step there and be left with sticky paws.

It did lead us to much muttering about how much we hate our floor though. And yes, those are nails sticking out. Fortunately they're hidden when the close door is closed.

2 comments:

Schnookie said...

Oh my god, I hate 7th Generation paper towels! I feel so much better knowing I'm not alone. I've felt like such a failure as a vaguely green-minded person, switching back to Bounty, but dude, those paper towels SUCK. (Also sucky? Getting laundry detergent all over the floor. We had that happen once and we were not so lucky that the cats avoided it. Even worse than mopping the detergent off the floor is bathing it off a cat. Because rather than just walking through it and getting it on his paws, he ran through it, slipped, and got it all over his body. Not. Fun.)

Meg said...

Oh no, the poor kitty! I am so glad my guys stayed far away from the detergent. So glad.

We felt bad about deciding to return to Bounty but they really are just that bad. One of our cats likes little better than attacking paper towels so we've decided that the remaining rolls will be donated to her. We think she'll particularly enjoy that flimsy texture they have. :)