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Don't Sweat the Petty Things

and

Don't Pet the Sweaty Things

I refuse to think of them as chin hairs. I think of them as stray eyebrows. -Janette Barber

Welcome to the Sanity Corner which should really be named the Insanity Corner.

This page is meant to get your mind off the business world for a few minutes and entertain you. Enjoy our madness!

tales from the single guy
by Tim Crass

tales from a mostly-sane mom

A Wrestlemania for Mops

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The Semifinals of Mop Wrestlemania

After witnessing the spectacle of the Summer Olympics opening ceremony, I welled up with a variety of emotions. Well, okay, only two emotions, but that’s pretty good for a guy, right? First I swarmed with intense rage after realizing that I am not a great athlete from Moldova. If the Good Lord would have blessed me with Moldovan ancestors and a flair for rowing or swordplay, I could be competing in Athens right now. Not only that, but I could also parade through the Olympic Village wearing the official Moldovan getup, which happens to be a hot pink pantsuit. I guess I also would have settled for being an Australian representative, since their bright green uniforms indubitably show free spirit. The second, subtler sentiment that warmed the cockles of my heart was a wistful regret that there was no Bjork-ridden opening ceremony for my mop tournament. No centaurs throwing glowsticks, no Parade of Nations, no Cube Man! If this Mop Wrestlemania thing becomes an annual event, you can bet that next year I’ll plan one doozy of an opening ceremony.

Wait a minute. What is this? Mawkish emotions? Hot-pink pantsuits? Warm-cockled heart? Let’s grab a beer, put in a chaw, and get back to sports. And by “sports,” I mean of course our Tournament of Mops. In case you missed the highlights of the opening-round match on SportsCenter, Swiffer defeated Ring-A-Mop by about a billion points and I almost had to talk my way out of a “Disorderly Conduct” ticket. So let’s move on to our next competition, which pits our current champ, the Swiffer, against the Grab-It.

The easiest way to describe Grab-It is to pilfer an analogy question from the SAT, preferably this one:

Grab-It is to Swiffer as

a)La Toya Jackson :: Janet Jackson

b)Billy Ripken :: Cal Ripken Jr.

c)Skid Row :: Guns n' Roses

d)Jacob's wife Leah :: Jacob's wife Rachel

The answer? I dunno, probably “c”. The point is that Grab-It is the Swiffer’s slow-witted younger sibling. It resembles the Swiffer, only without all the stuff that made me moony-eyed over the Swiffer in the first place. The Grab-It suffers from an inferior scent, an annoying name, and an utter lack of a Devo-inspired ad campaign. Now that I think of it, I’m changing my answer on the analogy question to “a”. That description is beginning to sound like LaToya.

What does Grab-It have going for it? Its wipes are about 60 cents cheaper than Swiffer’s. That alone isn’t about to make me erase “Swiffer” from the middle of the heart drawn on my Geography notebook. Nonetheless, with the current price of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer hovering around $6 per twelve pack, that means every time I stroll into a grocery store and choose Swiffer over Grab-It, I lose 1.2 cans of Pabst. Might as well pour that PBR on the flowers or swish it around in my mouth and spit it out like mouthwash. Swiffer, I love you, but that’s asking a lot.

The Grab-It also projects a substantially more wholesome image than Swiffer. Don’t be fooled by that AC/DC rip-off lightning bolt on Grab-It's wrapper. Instead, look closer at the name of the manufacturer: SC Johnson. But not just “SC Johnson” – every box bears the message, “SC Johnson: A Family Company.” The Swiffer displays no such positive announcement; only a terse, “Distr. By PROCTOR & GAMBLE, CINCINNATI, OH 45202.” Proctor and Gamble must not be a Family Company; otherwise they’d advertise it on the box. There’s plenty of room. But about a minute of research into Proctor and Gamble reveals this, and this, and also this. An evil mega corporation allegedly engaged in Satanism and puppy-torture? Nope, not a family company at all. I imagine that at this exact moment, while the Johnson family members are all either churning butter or knitting Grab-Its, Mr. Proctor and Mr. Gamble are up to no good. Bunny-punching, Satan-worshipping, evil-mega-corporationating; who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of those two? At the very least they might be proctoring or, worse still, gambling.

Before I speculate any more wildly about very rich people with very pricey lawyers (most of whom I’d assume have at least a passing familiarity with libel law), I might want to test-drive the Grab-It. All I need to do is open the box and get to Swiffering -- err, Grab-Itting. I’m pretty sure that I’ll sound like a sissy when I write this, but here goes: the Grab-It packaging is a pain to open. It’s a bank vault, for crying out loud. Now, the plastic container is nice enough that I’ll probably store all my paper clips or Kool-Aid Points in there when it’s empty. Still, it’s like cracking a safe just to take out a Grab-It.

First off, the Grab-It box contains a plastic pouch that requires scissors to open (you’ve probably already learned enough about my general incompetence to safely infer that scissors and I have always shared a stormy relationship). So I need to carefully, safely, and bloodlessly cut open the pouch, take out the wipes, spill Grab-It juice all over, throw away the pouch, and stuff the wipes back in the box. Why didn’t the Johnson family do this for me already? Was there a quilting bee that Aunt Emma didn’t want to miss? I know for a fact that Mr. Proctor and Mr. Gamble still pouchlessly assemble each pack of Swiffer wet wipes despite all the time they dedicate to evil-doing and, concomitantly, mustache-twisting.

Once I managed to pick the Grab-It lock and actually pull out a floor wipe, I found myself somewhat flummoxed. Grab-Its really are just a cheaper version of Swiffers. They are crafted with all the care of someone who once thought, “Well, I’ve got to get my family down to the hootenanny so lil’ Jimmy can square dance with the apple of his eye, and then I’ve got to tuck those little nippers into bed so they can wake up in time for the early church service . . . wait? What was I doing? Oh, yeah, the Swiffer rip-off. Here, I’ll just soak some paper towels in Formula 409.” Interior monologues aside, these Grab-Its are kind of inadequate. They clean your floor almost like a Swiffer, but there’s no magical delight, no spark, no swoon-inducing aroma.

As you’ll recall from last week’s matchup, Swiffer’s perfume absolutely captivated me. I once called it “the scent of a thousand angels, each one carrying a gold-plated twelve-inch submarine sandwich for me to eat.” (Guess I was hungry at the time). The Grab-It’s aroma? Not so swoony. Grab-It smells more like two angels, if one carries a warm can of orange soda and the other carries a tall, cool glass of ammonia. Oh, and these would be some seriously overweight and undershowered angels, too. Okay, it’s not that bad. It is disappointing, though, that once I’d mopped with a Grab-It, the floor didn’t smell like oranges or ammonia or chubby cherubs or anything. It just smelled like floor. Weird.

Final Score

You know, I’m getting sick of just berating mops and then posting some fake score willy-nilly. The Olympics aren’t like that. In addition to dressing their competitors in bizarrely designed and eye-bleedingly colored uniforms, they also give us an opportunity to get to know each athlete as an individual. So in the spirit of this summer’s Olympics, here’s an Up Close and Personal look at the Grab-It. Cue the sappy music.

Born to a Bounty paper towel and a bottle of Citrus Formula 409, Grab-It grew up in the rough-and-tumble cleaning supplies aisle of Nelson’s County Market in Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Tragedy struck the young Grab-It one rainy afternoon in July when its father fell from the shelf and was quickly removed to the “reduced for quick sale” bin, way over by the light bulbs. Despite the long odds of surviving, much less thriving, in the cleaning supplies aisle, Grab-It has demonstrated the heart of a champion by even managing to enter this contest.

Unfortunately, it has also demonstrated the talent of a bronze medallist. So, yeah, Swiffer wins, 45 to 36. While this match turned out much closer than our previous debacle, Swiffer really did have a comfortable lead until the judges got to the animal cruelty portion of the competition. A sample of the results from this section of the challenge reveals Swiffer’s Achilles heel:

	Swiffer	Grab-It
Aardvark-aggravating	-1	+5
Beaver-biting	-1	+5
Kitten-killing	-5	+5
Marmoset-mangling	-3	+5
Piggy-poking	-1	+5
Turtle-tormenting	-4	+5

For those of you unfamiliar with the international scoring format for mopping, Grab-It gains points simply for not torturing animals. So please understand, Grab-It does indeed perform only marginally better than notebook paper taped to a stick, but its manufacturer’s stubborn refusal to kill, torment, hassle, or even tease animals earns it the bronze.

As for Mr. Proctor and Mr. Gamble, their Swiffer is a wonderful creation. But now that it has been revealed that its makers allegedly engage in ritualistic animal sacrifice under the guise of “scientific research,” I hesitate to love the Swiffer as I once did. Whenever I smell that luxurious Swiffer scent, I will not sigh as deeply as I used to. Instead, I will wonder how many animals were forced to smell less-than-pleasing odors before the Proctor and Gamble chemists discovered the final formula for their Swiffer scent. I imagine a research facility full of turtles: one’s head slips into his shell like spaghetti sucked between lips. That turtle just whiffed scent #29, which is a curious mix of sulfur and Limburger. Other turtles reel with tumescence under the dizzying spell of scent # 43, which is the smell of grape jelly, dead flies, and female turtle pheromones. Only later will market research negate these lab findings, as potential consumers will most likely veto the turtles’ unanimous choice of #43. Who wants cleaning supplies that smell good to turtles?

Anyway, Swiffer wins again. They’ll move on to face the Clorox Readymop in the finals, where the winner will receive that one tinfoil trophy I still haven’t made yet. Today’s loser, on the other hand, goes home with the bronze medal. The Grab-It can rest assured, though, that it will be chosen over the Swiffer by millions of Americans who are inspired by either stinginess, a social conscience, or wacky and paranoid religious beliefs.

Tim graduated from Harvard’s prestigious Mop Studies program with an emphasis in Early Renaissance Mopping. He titled his Master’s thesis, “Be Here with Mop and Mow”: Housecleaning in Shakespeare. Tim is thinking of going to a tech school or something, perhaps to get a degree in VCR Repair or Tavern Management. Right now, though, he’s too busy kayaking, making wine, and playing guitar in northern Wisconsin’s premier Pixies tribute band, Noma. He can be reached at crasstimothy@hotmail.com.

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Don't Sweat the Petty Things

and

Don't Pet the Sweaty Things

A Wrestlemania for Mops

The Semifinals of Mop Wrestlemania

Final Score

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