Rant #960: No Soap

Two elephants were sitting in a bathtub together.

One said, "No soap."

The other replied, "No soap, radio!"

That is the all-time sucker joke, used to see if you are paying attention.

It isn't funny, was never meant to be funny, and quite frankly, it makes no sense.

Neither does the situation my family goes through every week regarding the use of soap.

When we shower, we use soap to clean our bodies.

Not that our bodies are dirty, but this way, we know we are clean from head to toe.

But somehow, bars of soap get eaten up here like hot dogs at the ball park.

There are three of us, as my daughter does not live with us.

Three people using a total of seven bars of soap during the week doesn't make too much sense.

The problem is one that many of us have gone through personally and have experienced as parents ...

We have a teenager in the house.

Our 17-year old son goes through soap like he goes through chocolate donuts; he doesn't leave a morsel behind.

When we are teenagers, for many of us it is the first time we have a sense of ourselves, or own beings, and the first time that we want to look good for ourselves, our friends, and certainly, the opposite sex.

So when he goes into the bathroom, he attacks the soap from both ends of the bar, so to speak, and seven bars of soap wrap around his body like a straightjacket.

Often times, he uses so much soap that when I go in to take a shower, there are either pieces the size of dimes that are left, or nothing at all.

In those cases, I use either body wash or hand soap, but to go through basically a bar a day ... how clean can a person possibly be?

One saving grace to all of this is that we buy our soap at the dollar store, so we can get seven bars of soap for $3 dollars. It is a cost-effective way to minimize the damage.

Luckily, since it is only Thursday, I found a brand new bar of Irish Spring in the cabinet, so I was able to bathe myself with a new bar of soap. There is still one fresh bar left, so until we go shopping on Saturday, I would think we would be OK.

But maybe I am assuming too much.

I like the fact that my son is taking care of his own personal effects, but I don't know if I will feel soap-safe unless we had 10 bars in the house.

His room is a mess, he throws stuff on the floor of his room and doesn't hang anything up, but he uses soap like there is no tomorrow ...

Meaning he is a typical teenager, and my wife and I really wouldn't have it any other way.