The Irritable Bowel Thief Strikes Again

All year, Marquette has been losing toilet paper. Nearly every week, the Marquette Tribune's Department of Public Safety crime blotter mentions that several rolls of toilet paper have gone missing.

A search of the Marquette Tribune's website for the words "toilet paper" turns up 24 articles dating from March 2004 to present. There have been three incidents reported in the Tribune since the beginning of the spring semester.

I'm not sure which part of this bothers me the most:

1. That someone is so determined in their theft of toilet paper that they have kept it up for almost a full year.
   
2. That no one has caught a person walking out of a bathroom with several rolls of toilet paper stuffed into his shirt. Almost all the incidents have involved more than 3 rolls, and once as many as 17 were taken.
   
3. The fact that the toilet paper's estimated value is $5 per roll. In the most recent incident, in which three rolls were stolen, the Tribune reported that the value of property lost was $15.
   

Five dollars for a roll of toilet paper? This isn't Charmin Ultra Soft by any means. The paper the university supplies us with is only a grade softer than the paper bags you put your lunch in. Maybe we could cut that $1400 tuition hike or supply more financial aid if we bought cheaper paper. I know that O'Donnell Hall has at least 6 bathrooms with 5 stalls in each. Each stall has 2 rolls of paper. That's 60 rolls of toilet paper just in this building. I'm not sure how long each roll lasts, but I'm willing to make a conservative estimate that each stall uses one roll a week. That means O'Donnel goes through 30 rolls of paper per week. That's $150 per week, just for O'Donnell. And O'Donnell only has three floors, about 300 residents. McCormick, with it's 11 floors and roughly 800 residents, must go through a lot more than that.

EDIT: One "Peter Rizzi" seems to have caught on. See his Viewpoint from the March 10, 2005 Tribune.