Today, I saw something that made me question humanity. One of those things that make you wonder, just how far have we actually progressed, exactly?

I saw a poster.

It was an ad at a Roger's store for some new smartphone I had never heard of and still know nothing about other than it's an HTC phone that appears to run Google's Android mobile OS. If that sentence means nothing to you, it's alright, it's not that important. What is important is what was on this ad.

The only guy I expect to understand what I just said.

It looks like just any old ad at quick glance. Nothing too fancy, just the phone, and the words "The Revolution is coming" with the Rogers logo. No big deal. Then I took another look.

It said "In 13 days."

"But Liam," you protest, "what's so bad about that?"

I would have no problem with this poster, if it had one of those Page-a-Day tearaway things for the countdown. Well, I would have slightly less of a problem, since that's still wasted paper, but still, it's not as bad as the realization I had.

None of that.

They have to put up a new one of these damn things daily.

I'll repeat that. They, the Roger's store, have to put up a fairly large poster every day until this phone-nobody-really-cares-about is released.

I found this in my pants after looking at the poster.

Do they not realize how much of a waste that is? I'm assuming they don't put those somewhere in a back room for children to go colour on if they have nothing to do. Think about this for a moment: They had 13 days to go. Therefore, somewhere in that store, was 12 more posters to put up daily at least. Maybe today wasn't the day they started, so there would be another one for each day. Maybe there were multiple posters inside the store, so there would be times X number of posters, where X is theamount of posters inside the store. And finally, this is ROGERS. There's another store at the mall, with the same poster, so that's another 12+ posters, and there are more than 2 Rogers stores in Canada.

This is starting to add up.

A rough estimate of the amount of paper needed to supply a single store's worth of ads.

My hope is this: They are given tubes to put each used poster in. The used posters are sent to Headquarters and recycled. If this is the case, almost all is forgiven. If not, I'm going to have to march to Rogers HQ and throw my pants-brick through a window. Rogers is such a large company, surely an elaborate poster with an LED countdown timer could be made for each store. (ONE per store, and ONLY one. I know when I see something shiny like LEDs, I get the picture.) It would cut down on paper consumption, and hey, when the next big-thing-nobody-friggin'-cares-about comes out, they could reuse the timer! Or, maybe, they could scrap the ad altogether, because, as I've said before, nobody really gives a crap.

And since the deed is done, my solution for the here-and-now? Everybody buy the piece-of-junk-nobody-has-heard-about-until-now, and everybody use it instead of paper. Maybe it might even stimulate the economy. Or give us all super-powered thumbs.