Can We, As A Society, Really Call Ourselves Advanced If We Are Still Using Towels?

Most mornings I wake up to a pre-programmed alarm clock that plays a random song located in my MP3 player which contains 4576 of my favorite songs. My coffee maker starting brewing a fresh pot ten minutes after I wake. I turn on the TV to watch sports highlights from the previous night taped on my DVR without my prompting. I drive to work, listening to one of 170 stations beamed to me from a satellite high above the Earth while I talk to New York City on my cell phone (using another satellite or two), which I will use once parked to check my Gmail and Fantasy Team . From my desk I can instantly chat with a colleague in Macao, monitor the number of Guests calling our Call Center at that moment, listen to music derived from an Algorithm based on Feel Good, Inc. by the Gorillaz, and instantly look up who played Sgt. Hulka in Stripes (Warren Oats, R.I.P.) - all at once. And yet, when I get out of the shower to start my day, I still have to wipe down every square inch of my body with an 30 inch by 54 inch piece of Organic Cotten stitched together in India and sold to me via West Elm (to be honest it was a gift). And that, to me, is absurd.


According to the all-knowing Wikipedia "The invention of the towel associated, at least apocryphally, with the city of Bursa in Turkey. The city is still noted for the production of 'Turkish towels.' " Drilling down further we find that "until the early nineteenth century, when the textile industry mechanized, bath toweling could be relatively expensive to purchase or time-consuming to create. There is some question how important these sanitary linens were for the average person—after all, bathing was not nearly as universally popular 200 years ago as it is today... As the cotton industry mechanized in this country, toweling material could be purchased by the yard as well as in finished goods. By the 1890s, an American house-wife... could purchase terry cloth by the 'y'ard, cut it to the appropriate bath towel size her family liked, and hem it herself. " I give all this history to make my point - besides the personal hemming and the usage of the word 'y'ard, how different is this product from the one used roughly 120 years ago??? And it's not like the Wheel or Fire or the Bloomin' Onion, where the original invention was the perfect incarnation; this one can use some improvement. Again, this is absurd. I can only think of several reasons how this is possible:


1) After we shower our brain is in a cognitive shortcut mode, saving itself for more appropriate work. This is an evolutionary development as billions of tiny decisions are made every day. the brain doesn't have time to process each one so it creates habits. Little things like wiping down your body, finding Ben Stiller funny no matter what crap he's in, enjoying Myley Cyrus, or slapping anybody from The Hills, become unconscious acts.


2) The technological alternatives are too expensive. Both Triton and Airobe have "Body Dryers" but given that I cannot find a price for either anywhere on the Net I have to assume they are cost-prohibitive alternatives. Future potential body-drying barons see this, do a quick cost-benefit analysis, and decide to focus their attention on other potential markets such as flat-screen candles, hermit crab farming, and web porn.

3) The Towel Cartel of Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Linens & Things, Target, JC Penny, Google, Turkey, and Steve Jobs is even more powerful than previously thought.

The cynic in me thinks it is (1) and perhaps we've already gone to far to change our programming; the businessman/MBA looks to (2) and thinks there are riches to uncover yet (if my couch wasn't so damn comfortable); the realist in me sadly accepts (3) as our current state and believes that until we rise up, as One, we will be stuck in this inefficient, time-prohibitive, and slightly damp means of moisture elimination. Until that glorious day comes the question begs: Can We, As A Society, Really Call Ourselves Advanced If We Are Still Using Towels?