This is something The Bloggess would get picked to do because she is weberatti and because she believes public washrooms are zen zones, but apparently Charmin is looking for unknowns to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas manning their Grand Central Station washrooms* and then blogging, tweeting and otherwise letting the known universe in on the wonderliciousness of it all.

This is how toilet tissue is sold in my native land and one more reason to not admit I am from there when we move overseas. That and the whole terrorists might kill me thing.

“It’s pays money,” I told Rob.

“But you have to live in the bathroom, right? It’s a 24/7 thing.”

“They’re paying $10,000,” I repeated the money thing because I didn’t think he’d heard.

“To live in a bathroom that thousands of who knows where they’ve been people are walking in and out of to take care of any private function you can imagine every day for five weeks!”

“For $10,000,” I said – again – “And you get to blog about it and tweet and make YouTube videos.”

“In a bathroom where people piss and shit,” he was really stuck on the negatives. “Do you have to eat in there too?”

“Well, I would imagine they give you breaks,” I said, not really knowing and not really sure. It’s in America after all where “reality” is carried to extremes.

“You want to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, no.” Okay the money, the blogging and the attention would be interesting but there is the whole toilet aspect to consider. He had a good point there. If I were 22, homeless already with no immediate job prospects, this might sound like a better opportunity.

“I’m not going to live in a bathroom in Grand Central Station for 5 weeks,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a family thing,” I said.

“So you want to go to New York for five weeks by yourself?”

Already I can’t picture Rob and Dee for five weeks on their own with me checking in via an iPhone. I think this kind of technological upgrade would be necessary in order to pull this off when you are not a homeless 22-year-old college drop-out without prospects but the Charmin people would have to foot the tech bill or that $10,000 would be eaten by the expense. Which I guess is why they are looking for bloggers as we tend to work for free when we aren’t paying people for the privilege of providing Google with content they can turn around and sell.

“No, I can’t be gone for 5 weeks,” I said, although in the corner of my mind where all outlandish ideas are given more than a cursory once over, wheels are spinning. The three of us in a washroom? Living in Grand Central Station? Better than Balloon Boy Family tv. And it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where two kids run away to the Metropolitan Museum and live there for a while. I wonder why Grand Central Station? Why not the Met or MOMA. I could live for 5 weeks in a Museum.

In the end, I decided that even with my allergy reduced sense of smell, I couldn’t live in a public washroom for any length of time. Not even the luxury Charmin potties.

*Updated-Times Square. Luxury porta-potties in Times Square. My bad. Check the link though because they look pretty up-scale. Still, outdoors? They must be looking for people willing to camp. Can you camp in Times Square?