Parker Jacobs ’17
If someone would have told me as a freshman that by my senior year I would be in charge of writing papers that go on the back of bathroom stalls, I would’ve laughed hysterically. I’ve never really been someone to go out of my way to write anything for the public, especially something that would be displayed all over Woodberry’s campus.
Parker Jacobs ’17
However, when I was applying to be an Editor for The Oracle, then Editor-in-Chief Caleb Rogers (Class of 2016) suggested that, instead of working on the main online newspaper, I create something totally new for The Oracle. He told about how he saw these informative papers that were in bathrooms at colleges he was visiting. Caleb wanted to incorporate this idea of having a publication in bathrooms into the Oracle. That being said, he was about to graduate at this time and decided to put me in charge of creating this new way of bathroom publication for next year. It took me awhile to decide on how I would approach this and what I would call it. At first I wanted to name it “The Weekly Poop Scoop”, but Mr. Guldin quickly shot that down, which was a great call looking back on it. Then I asked him if it could be called the Toilet Paper, and that worked for the both of us. Picking the name would be the easiest part of the whole ordeal.
I spent hours deciding which direction the newly created Toilet Paper should go. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be an opinionated paper or to be used solely for campus athletics. Mr. Guldin wanted to make sure I knew that these papers will be read by everyone on campus, including faculty members, and that it should interest everyone, not just one group of people. It took me a couple of drafts to eventually come to the finalized first issue of the Toilet Paper. I thought it looked great and Mr. Guldin gave me the green light to begin publishing it around campus.
Giving it a name was somewhat of a challenge, making it was pretty time consuming and difficult, but the hardest part is putting all two hundred papers up in every bathroom stall on campus. The first time doing it, I had to ask a couple friends to help me after a long hour of constantly taping and moving bathroom to bathroom. Though I knew there wasn’t an easier way to do it, I wished that there had been, because it was tiring and by the end of the day it had taken me and two other guys three and half hours to get to every bathroom.
After a couple weeks of working on the Toilet Paper, I began to get into the rhythm of it and was soon feeling confident about it. Many of my classmates came up to me and asked me if the Toilet Paper was going to continue because they had been enjoying reading it so much. So with that new knowledge, I began working even harder on it and began adding additional material to each new issue. For a couple weeks in the fall I had the presidential election polls, then during the winter trimester I decided to have a section known as the “Bachelor of the Week”, and then most recently I have added “Mr. Huber’s Forest Trivia”. I have greatly enjoyed being able to customize the Toilet Paper and add new parts to it every week.
As this school year comes to a conclusion, as well my career as the publisher of The Oracle’s Toilet Paper, I will say that I have enjoyed my time with the Toilet Paper and will miss doing it next year. Though there were some moments in the course of the year I wish it had not been so time consuming, looking back on it I am glad that I did it. I hope that next year’s Oracle Editors (Trace Richard and Spencer Dearborn) will continue what I have started and make the Oracle as great as I know it can be.
More versions of the Toilet Paper:
Toilet Paper Issue #21 [May 14, 2017] PDF
Toilet Paper Issue #20 [May 9, 2017] PDF
Toilet Paper Issue #19 [April 30, 2017] PDF
Toilet Paper Issue #18 [April 23, 2017] PDF
Toilet Paper Issue #17 [April 16, 2017] FINAL
Toilet Paper Issue #16 [April 9, 2017]
Toilet Paper Issue #16 [April 9, 2017]
Toilet Paper Issue #15 [April 2, 2017]
Categories: Today
The Woodberry Oracle 