O beauty!

The elements of the spindle top to bottom:  (A) The body ; (B) the compression spring; (C) the pin 

Suffering will always be with us. Almost nothing good can be counted on to be here tomorrow.  However... 

I have lived at my current address for nearly 30 years, far longer than any other address in my life, approaching as long as all other places combined.  This house is five years older than me.  When it was put together at the birth of a new suburb in the environs of a large important city more than 60 years ago, it was equipped with some amenities that are still in use today.  A doorbell that still makes the heart stop when engaged by some unannounced visitor.  A Roper gas range still vented by the original NuTone hood and exhaust fan.  And perhaps most importantly of all, a recessed toilet paper holder with its original wooden spindle which still has its original spring. 

I cannot stress enough the importance of this feature. Just three parts to the spindle: the fixed body  (A) with its end pegged to fit into a niche on either side of the wall recess, and a chamber into which a coiled compression spring (B) is loaded, followed by a pin (C) with a head at one end designed to fit only one way into the chamber and then turned to prevent its retraction and at the other end a counterpart pegged end to fit into the opposite niche from the one that the body's pegged end will occupy.  

To change a roll, the spindle is compressed to clear one of its ends from its niche, the spindle is removed from the recess, the empty roll is replaced on the spindle with a new roll, one end of the spindle is fitted into its niche within the recess and then the spindle is compressed to fit the opposite pegged end into its counterpart niche .  The component which makes this miracle happen every few days is the spring--  0.04 inch gauge steel wire coiled 10 times to a length (a "free length" to use spring terminology as distinct from the length of wire used to make the spring) 1.5 inches around a quarter inch diameter--  the tension of which holds both ends of the spindle in place when a new roll is deployed yet which must be limber enough to permit the compression of the spindle twice every time a roll is replaced.    Who knows how many times a year for 60 years?  

Well the popular statistics site statista knows.  Per a 2018 consumer market study, being an American toilet paper dispenser  (top of the list natch), it is changed on average 141 times per year per person  divided by 2 bathrooms in my house which comes to something like 200 times a year.  At a rate of 1.8 days per roll per year I am certain that this is high, but I’ll go with it on the theory that my under average sized household is statistically on the low side compared to those who preceded me at the address.  Conservatively then, in its more than 65 years of use, the spring has been compressed and extended a minimum of 26,000 times.  

A spring can be expected to last somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 cycles, so it is already at the high end of life, but based on my intimate experience of it every other day or so, it is not showing its age.  Rather amazing considering that it has spent most of its life compressed-- under stress between the end of the chamber it sits in and the head of the pin it shares its space with.  I frequently marvel at the quality of spring it still has left in it.  And it is older than me, and more used.  I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the quiet certitude I am free to have in the part it plays-- mostly unobserved-- in my daily life.  

Every now and then though (this morning for instance), in changing a roll, some misalignment of the notched head of the pin allows it to clear the shelf of the chamber that holds it in place, at which point the tension of the spring will project the pin and itself out of the chamber onto the dubious, generally poorly lit plane of the bathroom floor.  Whereas the pin is easily spotted, the delicate insubstantial spring, being immediately swallowed up by the darkness of this quadrant of the bathroom floor, risks being inadvertently crushed out of utility by an errant shod foot before it can be found.  Catastrophe in the making!  

On the other hand: