The butt wipe apocalypse

M
iss Panic shoved her way through the crowd using her shopping cart as a battering ram. There was only one thing on her mind. Toilet paper was worth its weight in gold. And, dammit! She was going to get her share, as well as her neighbor’s. In fact she was buying enough for her whole block for the next millennium! 
Luck was on her side. A new shipment had just arrived. As she ran over the last of the other shoppers, joy spread all over her face, dressed in her fuzzy panda bear slippers and bathrobe, Wal-mart never knew what hit them. This was Miss Panic, hoarder extraordinaire. Somehow she managed to cram 170 cases in her one shopping cart. It was too bad she was still single, because she could have brought her husband or children, if she had any, to follow behind with other carts. As she left the toilet paper aisle, she glanced back, tears rolling down her cheeks that there were still other cartons of this precious paper left behind. 
When she got to her mini-van she spent an hour packing and rearranging the cartons. There was just enough room for a few more cartons, so back into the store she went. After this round of shopping cart roller derby, she made it to the same aisle. And to her horror, it was completely empty, except for the bodies of former customers that were unlucky enough to not get out of Miss Panic’s previous excursion. She kicked one of the corpses of a victim she recognized as she left, cursing him for costing her those three precious seconds.
When she made it home and unpacked, she was tired and hungry. But now the only food she could find was a bottle of soy sauce she had left on the counter the day before. All the other food was buried behind cartons of toilet paper. She held the soy sauce in one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other. But without rice to go with it, the idea of toilet paper and soy sauce just wasn’t that appetizing. In a few days, she realized her dilemma with her empty digestive system. All that paper and nothing to wipe.
But she had her toilet paper, so life was good. She had her ass covered.
I know this is ridiculous and not exactly how it actually happens. But it’s no more ridiculous than the stories you get about what really goes on with this craze of hoarding. This hoarding doesn’t limit itself to toilet paper. Actually, I don’t understand the need to hoard toilet paper. I guess I can see hand sanitizer and disinfectants. But the real problem with the current hoarding craze comes when you stand in line for a year and a half at the big-box store. By the time you’ve reached the checkout with your 40 gallons of milk, it has turned to cheese, and then you’re flat broke because cheese is a lot more expensive than milk. Didn’t plan ahead very well, did ya? And did you really think you were going to get away with the hoarding when you bought 17,000 cases of hand sanitizer and started to hold public auctions, selling it for four or five times what you bought it for? That doesn’t make you smart, it just makes you a miserable excuse for a human being – and pretty stupid too. When you start price gouging from the back of your truck in a parking lot the police are going to notice!
And if you’re in the middle of Wal-mart fighting over one gallon of milk – such actually happened in Rapid City – you’re not acting in a way that’s going to get the opposite sex thinking, “Hey! I think I want some of that!” And let’s face it, milk doesn’t taste that good? Neither does the blood you are now tasting because of a punch in the mouth by Miss Panic, and she wasn’t even after the milk. You were just in her way, while she was on a mission.
This isn’t the zombie apocalypse. Is it a serious threat? Of course. But the threat we are causing to others by our overreacting is much more serious. And why are we going into this hoarding mode of existence? We wouldn’t run out of these items if we behaved ourselves. There are goods being produced all over the country. They are being shipped and the stores will be stocked. So don’t panic. When we get on the other side of this crisis, what is going to happen with all the oversupply of toilet paper you have stuffed in your basement? What’s the plan? I guess we could have an all-day TP the town party. But I’m not cleaning it up!