Hotels Of The City

9/10/11

Hotel Toilet paper folding

Hotel toilet paper folding is a common practice performed by hotels worldwide as a way of assuring guests that the bathroom has been cleaned, and sometimes, with more elaborate foldings, to impress or delight guests with the management's creativity and attention to detail.
The common fold normally involves creating a triangle \nabla or "\vee" shape out of the first sheet or square on a toilet paper roll. Commonly, the two corners of the final sheet are tucked behind the paper symmetrically, forming a point at the end of the roll. More elaborate folding results in shapes like fans, sailboats, and even flowers.
Toilet-paper folding (also known as "toilet paper origami") has attracted the attention of observers within the hotel industry and beyond it, involving both sober discussion of the practice as a marketing move as well as wry commentary with various degrees of seriousness. The practice has been considered an emblematic example of a meme copied across the world from a hotel to another until the point that most of them now do it. 

Extent

The practice is followed by hotels "the world over", according to Stephen Gill, a British photographer who published a book of pictures of folded hotel toilet paper from various nations.
Dr. Susan Blackmore, who uses the example of hotel toilet-paper folding to illustrate the use of "memes", pointed out in the 2006 Darwin Day Lecture before the British Humanist Association that even a remote guesthouse she visited in rural Assam in India folded the first sheet on its rolls of toilet paper.
Hotel toilet-paper folding is such an institution that in the horror movie 1408 it is used as one of the eerie happenings noticed by the main character — after using the toilet paper, he finds it mysteriously has been freshly folded over.



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