Every towel has those lines; they must have a purpose, right? Software engineer Nate McGrady has attracted a lot of attention and stirred passionate debate on X because he dared to question a part of our everyday lives that most of us are so accustomed to, we hardly notice it. What’s the deal with the rough lines that interrupt the softness of a standard bathroom towel? Just about every towel has them, so there must be a reason, right?
One would assume they serve a purpose because why else would manufacturers inject rough patches into otherwise soft towels? Also, over time and after repeated washes, they can cause the towel to lose its shape, making it harder to fold. McGrady posed the question to the folks of X, and the tweet received over 91 million views.
“What is the purpose of this part of a towel?” McGrady wrote. “I’m convinced that it only exists to shrink and make it impossible to fold the towel nicely, causing you to buy another towel.” Could the rough lines be there as a sort of planned obsolescence? If we removed the rough lines, would towels last a few years longer, costing the towel industry billions? Many people scratched their heads when the question was asked, so instead of solving the problem, they took the opportunity to make jokes about the lines in the towel.
The post also inspired some people to come up with answers that challenged our fundamental understanding of scenes, physics, and reality in general. Some brave people took a genuine shot at answering the question many of us had been wondering about but nobody had thought to ask.
