UW is in the midst of a paradigm shift. In an effort to make campus more gender-inclusive, the homies that run the school decided to make more gender-neutral bathrooms. A few of these existed prior to this year but they appear to be a little more common than they were a couple years ago.

This is neither good nor bad. People that are uncomfortable with participating in the gender-binary restroom system should have a place to use the bathroom in public and semi-public places without moms from mid-western suburbs who voted for Michele Bachmann in the 2012 GOP primaries complaining like “How am I going to explain to my children how a man dressed like a woman is allowed to use the women’s restroom because they feel like it?” ad nauseam. At the same time, these one-stall-per-room configurations are a more inefficient use of space if looking to accommodate a large group of people. Like virtually everything in the universe, there’s trade-offs, but I’m generally okay with putting up with the personally inconveniencing aspects of things if it benefits a marginalized demographic minority that’s had to deal with stupid petty bullshit since basically forever, as long as their experiencing something doesn’t compromise my experience of the same thing.

All this being said, I think this trend of making single-occupant gender-neutral bathrooms (SOGNB’s) will continue to increase in popularity so the rest of y’all are going to have to deal with how to use them correctly, since a disturbingly large amount of UW students don’t have a clue how to conduct themselves in this type of environment.  And this isn’t even from a being-insensitive-to-trans-ppl perspective. I don’t think anybody at UW is really outraged about the general existence of gender ambiguous people on campus and their conduct within restrooms. This all virtually stems from people physically being unable to indicate that a SOGNB is occupied or not. People regularly fail to lock the door behind them when they occupy a SOGNB, and I regularly run into these people and in turn regularly experience completely avoidable emotional trauma as I walk in to the sound of girls peeing or someone saying “Umm, there’s someone in here…”

If you choose to use a SOGNB for whatever reason, you need to lock the door behind you. I’ll repeat for effect: if you choose to use a SOGNB for whatever reason, you need to lock the door behind you. If you do not, you are not smart. The opposite of smart, in fact. Dumb, even. You are dumb if you do not lock the door behind you when you use a SOGNB.

It’s not cool to break anyone’s sense of privacy in a designated private area within a public place. But this isn’t the fault of the person walking in on someone because it’s not their responsibility to indicate the occupancy status of a private room they’re about to use, since they’re, you know, not using it yet. It’s the user’s fault for misleading the unintentional intruder to invite his/her use. You shouldn’t subject people to a false sense of security, particularly if these SOGNB’s have a stall built within them. You can drastically reduce the amount of unwanted people that want to enter rooms you occupy by locking the door behind you.

It doesn’t matter that you were around when the SOGNB used to be a women’s room or men’s room or that there’s a stall within it. It doesn’t matter if you think either party is overreacting. This whole matter is a courtesy thing but also a safety thing. What if a creepster catches you peeing and tries to fondle you? I don’t think this has happened yet (San Fran has a lot of public SOGNB’s and there’s been no reported asaults, per Google), but you invite the possibility of it when you shit in private, unlocked rooms. To say that this point is irrelevant because perceived dangers of public restrooms still exist is moot. First off, it’s against the law for the opposite sex to enter a public bathroom; second, these bathrooms only have locks for the toilet stalls, if any; and third, these kinds of restrooms are meant to be accessible to anyone so putting a lock on the entire thing defeats the purpose of even having one, so if you’re against SOGNB’s for a safety reasons you might as well advocate against all public restrooms for all their inherent dangers.

It doesn’t matter that it’s geared for the general public to use. SOGNB’s entire reason for existing is so that people that are in a public place that have to go to the bathroom that don’t want to be subjected to using a public restroom precisely so that they don’t have to be subjected to that. You break the sanctity of that use when you mess up and forget to lock it. If you’re making noise about people “getting what they ask for” because SOGNB’s are accessible to the public and someone walks in on them, go shit in a public restroom and leave SOGNB users alone forever.

I think part of the problem is that instead of building new SOGNB’s within existing buildings, we’re just retrofitting bathrooms that used to be just for one gender. So instead of thinking “Yo this is a radical new bathroom that’s only designed for one person I should lock the door because it would be mad awkward if someone walked in on me de-Chipotleing myself,” people are more inclined to think, “Wow this is just the same bathroom, it even has all the stalls and everything, am I even sure this is a SOGNB?” So people in charge of the bathroom gender designation portion of building design need to make its intent really clear, and people retrofitting existing bathrooms need to do something like knocking all the stall walls down to get rid of all smaller private spaces within this space already designated as private.

This is not a hard concept to wrap one’s head around. Lock the door when you use a single-occupant gender-neutral bathroom.

But this is no time to complain.  I’m not about to complain about whatever after a seven month absence.  Some of you are thinking an absence of content generation this long is unforgivable and unprofessional.  I have my reasons and they don’t need to be aired out here in the public realm.  Time changes people in different ways, but my bathroom journalism hasn’t been altered one bit by its flows.  It is a monolith that stands all tests in all the dimensions of space and time, for the better of your lives or worse.  How many kinds of things like that are there in the universe? When you factor in all the bullshit out there, and even just on Earth itself, it comes down to negligible amounts.  Shit’s palpable, man.  You can actually quantify all the bullshit in the universe and express it as a rational function over time.  That line gets mad close to hitting the asymptote at x = 0 but there’s still that 0.00000000000000000000001 of realness being emitted from distant nebulas and from certain kinds of subatomic particles though.  Obviously it’s more complicated than that but I don’t have time to explain everything because I have to discuss Smith Hall and its bathroom infrastructure so just look it up in a book or whatever.

Smith Hall is located in the quad.  It’s the one physically connected to Gowen Hall but for some stupid reason you can’t actually go from one part of the building to the other part.  To the best of my knowledge if you’re in Gowen but have to go to Smith you have to go outside and back in again even though they’re in the same building.  That’s some questionable decisions being made right there.  Then you have to think about why all three main entrances into Smith are all at different floors.  The south entrance entrance is on the ground floor, the east one is on the second floor, and the north one goes to the first floor.  I get slopes and all that but why do you have to over-complicate things like this?  It’s madness.  But anyways, there’s a pretty good bathroom on the first floor, which is right by the south entrance, off the main hallway.

When I went in there to go pee-pee there were already probably three dudes in there but the lights were out and there’s no windows in there.  So people were just pissing while shrouded in darkness, like pissing in the dark at a specific target (urinal, obviously) was a totally normal thing to do.  They just put up with it.  At least three people thought, “Man, this whole navigating through dark windowless rooms in buildings built in the 20th century thing is getting old, I wonder if the architects put light switches somewhere… nah it’s too much effort to try to find it so fuck it I’ll just piss in the dark and deal with the myriad of consequences that could be associated with my impending future course of action.”  All those dudes had that thought at one point in time and were totally cool with not resolving that problem.  Those dudes are probably gonna be fathers someday, man.  They’re gonna be in charge of processing your insurance claims or telling you to fill out paperwork in the waiting room at doctor’s offices or building infrastructure or debugging viruses from your computer or fixing your transmission.  They’re gonna be in positions of handling actual responsibilities someday but they cannot manage the responsibility of not peeing on things except for the urinal in men’s bathrooms.  The sad thing is that 90% of the human race is either on par with or below these dudes in terms of the ability of making life decisions.  Meditate on that.

But when I turned on the lights, things became much better!  You could see where you were going ( and peeing) and marvel at how low-key cool this bathroom is.  It’s decently sized, with three stalls and four urinals, although the latter are unevenly spaced from one another for no real reason (but probably some underlying plumbing issue).  They’re the urinals with the really large basins that hold a couple gallons of water that you pee into except that instead of the usual curvilinear shape that they come in, they were the rarer diamond-shaped variety, which I don’t think I had seen on campus before.  However, the diamond urinals are purely designed for aesthetics, as I did not notice any change in performance, for better or for worse, out of the urinal I used.

A pretty great feature of this bathroom was its extensive utilization of shelves.  Undoing your belt and unzipping and unbuttoning your pants are generally regarded as two-hand jobs, and when you are stuck in the situation of urgently needing to do any combination of the above three actions but simultaneously holding things in your hands, shelves are a really good solution to this problem. Shelves are also a good solution when you need to wash your hands but you already have things in your hands that you need to keep dry.  Smith Hall 1st floor men’s has a long shelf spanning clear across both the urinal area and the sink area, which means really easy access to a place to put things on when you pee or wash your hands.  Smith might have become overly enthusiastic about providing surfaces to put things on, because in an unused corner of the bathroom they just placed a big wooden box as a corner table for you to put large things on.  It doesn’t get in the way of anybody so overall I think it’s a pretty good addition.  Some other nice features of this bathroom include wooden doors and nicely finished metal walls and supports on the stalls.

Cons of this place would be the massive amount of undergrads that will go here during passing periods, since Smith has a couple decent-sized lecture halls.  There’s also no windows, so that means lots of artificial light and pretty bad air circulation.  So most of the problems associated with this bathroom is going to be density-based.  Avoid passing periods and you should be fine.

The first review of 2015 is graced by the first floor bathroom of Eagleson Hall.  Eagleson is located off the main affair of campus, on the corner of 15th and 42nd.  It looks like a castle buttress, sort of.  This building is initially very intimidating because they have numpads on all the exterior doors.  I had some horrible economics lecture there a couple years ago but I don’t remember the doors having those features yet.  You gotta imagine all sorts of crazy folks that hang out on the Ave try to do all kinds of shenanigans near there so they’re just trying to fortify.  You don’t want some drugged out dude going through all your academic shit.  So I imagine security’s pretty tight nowadays.

Eagleson happens to be the home of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences.  I know some people that studied that in college, so I know that it’s totally a thing, I just have no idea what sort of studies this would entail.  It’s this small portion of the academic universe my satellite telescopes can’t take pictures of.  No clue.  The one thing I do know about SHS is that there are approximately 0% men in this field since every person in that building except the secretary was female.  This is good for those of us that fall in the (1) male and (2) need to go to the bathroom but you’re near the Ave and it’s before dark demographics.  You gotta imagine the female restrooms in there are a nightmare.  The lines during passing periods must be all kinds of wackness.  Sanitary napkins everywhere, you know?  Those aren’t really my area of expertise though.  I’m more well-versed in the male and unisex varieties for sure.

I mean, the interior of the 1st floor men’s room isn’t anything to write home about.  It can be summed up in three words: beige and windowless.  There’s a couple strategically placed mirrors to make it look bigger, which it kind of does I suppose.  There’s a urinal and a stall.  I ducked into the stall and it was nice and spacious, not too dark and cavernous.  This bathroom has a nice shelf addition across from the sinks so you don’t have to finagle with your messenger bag or man purse or satchel or whatever is in your hands that you can’t hold while you’re going to the bathroom or don’t want to put on the bathroom floor.  It was clean and odorless.  Not much more you can ask out of a bathroom, except with the bonus of the aforementioned 10000000000:1 female:male ratio so you will never have to be afraid of being near a human being that produces more testosterone than estrogen while you’re pooping if you ever choose to do so here.  Definitely gonna stash this one in the mind palace for when I’m wandering about the Ave during daylight hours.

There’s a little bathroom alcove in the rear (or front, depending on how you orient yourself from the main entrance to the commons in the south end of the building but that makes it closer to the north front where literally everyone else goes to enter the building) of the classrooms and lecture halls that’s around a couple corners.  You kinda figure that there’s gotta be a bathroom around that area since it’s this isolated entity from the rest of the dormitory-designated area.  There’s signs and stuff that assure you get to the bathroom safe and sound but it was cool how you intuitively know where the approximate location of the bathroom was based on the layout of that floor (that was the case for me at least).

I peed in the men’s room which seemed like it had never been used before based on how clean it was.  Maybe most people can’t find it too easily after all.  Even if people use it or not it can definitely accommodate the rush of people that need to pee after a long lecture.  Nothing much to say here except that it’s a nice private bathroom that I’m pretty sure you can access until like 9 or 10pm.  Even if there’s an event going on you could probably manage to infiltrate said event to use it as long as you don’t look like a dork and show up in sweatpants or something and you seem to know what you’re doing.

Then I pooped in the “family restroom” adjacent to it because why not?  Why poop in a tiny stall when you can poop in an entire room all by yourself?  These places 100% ensure that nobody’s going to bother you while you poop.  These places rock, but they’re not efficient when you’re thinking about large events since there won’t be enough space for every person that has to poop after a 200-person lecture to all get their own private room.  But this is America, land of where you can damn well poop by yourself if your heart so desires, efficiency be damned.  Carpe diem.

Calling it the “family restroom” is a little misleading too because it implies that its intended use is for your family of four to all poop there together simultaneously.  Besides, who would bring their entire family to an academic conference or symposium?  You’d seriously bring your toddler with you even though you’re probably wealthy enough to afford child care for your kid and have him or her cry and yell and fidget in the middle of this lecture that you’re either obligated to go to or sincerely interested in the material being presented, meaning that there’s an incentive for you to really focus on the material at hand, yet you’re just going to bring your kid with you and make sure it isn’t obnoxious the whole time instead?  Get real.  Just call it the gender neutral or handicapped restroom or something.  Just don’t bring your kid to lectures or anything remotely academic or important to your career, ever.  Everyone will remember you as the person that brought their stupid kid with them and will like you less because your kid bothered them.  You’re the equivalent of bringing your kid onto an airplane to have it cry the entire time and just not give a shit about it because what can you do, right?

Anyway, the “family restroom” is neat except that the custodians put the toilet paper rolls in the wrong way (pulling the roll from the back).  Always put the roll on the holder so that it rolls out clockwise and the sheet you pull is in the front.  Why do people not always do this?

The other issue with this one is that the single toilet is directly in front of the sink mirror so you’re watching your reflection poop and wipe your booty.  This is a really strange experience.  Not that I’m going to have to poop in front of strangers anytime soon but it made me very self-conscious and completely flipped the notion of privacy you typically get in the single occupancy bathrooms.  Prepare for a psychological roller coaster when you use this one.

We’re kicking 2014 off with the recently rebuilt Ethnic Cultural Center.  This is located kind of a ways away from the main portion of campus by all the southern dorms that have been going up the last year or two.  All the construction is pretty contemporary and stuff.  That new technology-sustainability-urban-living sort of feel to it that is pretty much everywhere in Seattle now where they try to do unique cool designs but everything ends up looking more or less the same.  But that’s another issue.  Anyways it’s on the corner of Brooklyn and 40th.

The interior hasn’t really been broken in yet and everything’s still pretty sleek and shiny and not that dirty.  I’m not really sure what all goes down at the Ethnic Cultural Center, aside from celebrating various cultures and ethnicities, but it’s I think that it’s less utilized than what they want it to be.  Fortunately, those types of building attributes usually make for pretty good bathroom hunting material.  New, underused buildings translate to good bathrooms. If this is an actual hunt, I would say an appropriate game comparison would be a water buffalo or a swordfish/marlin.  They’re the swordfish of the bathroom game.

So these bathrooms are pretty nice!  The surfaces are clean and the toilets themselves don’t have afteruse residue around them and the toilet paper was in ample supply.  As a bonus, they have the single person multi-use bathroom that has one toilet and a locking door right next to the gender-separated ones. I used the multi-use one first to take a big stinky dump and avoided much public scorn in the process.  These are absolutely necessary if your digestive system is recovering from dangerously high coffee and/or Memo’s consumption.  There’s also a vending machine for tampons that cost a quarter, for all the folks that have to experience menstrual cycles.  Nice.

The men’s room is still clean and nice and everything, but there’s a couple issues.  First, doesn’t the ECC host events and have a stage and everything? (At least the old one across the street did.)  If that’s the case, why are there only two freaking urinals?  And only one toilet stall?  You can’t have more than four people in there at any given time, not that the bathroom itself is that small, but just because there aren’t enough receptacles to go around for much more people than that.  There’s going to be a big, stupid line down the hallway into the foyer thing and then you’re going to have to bump into people in the bathroom and it’s going to be awkward.  Why couldn’t they have just avoided all this by putting in maybe two more urinals and maybe another stall?

And what’s the deal with the soap dispensers?  There’s two sinks in the sink area.  The left one has a soap dispenser against the wall, but the right one doesn’t.  So if you have the right sink and don’t want to look like a degenerate that doesn’t wash his or her hands after you go to the bathroom, you have to finagle your way around the person on the left to reach the soap dispenser and drip water all over the floor, go back to the sink to rinse all the soap off, and then drip more water on the floor to reach for the paper towels.  This process get compounded in tediousness when there’s an event going on and there’s a rush to use the bathroom.  Not that dripping water is gross or anything, but having water all over the sink tops and the floor just isn’t that clean looking, you know?  Paper towel dispensers might be another thing but at least put the soap dispensers in a place that’s convenient for more than 50% of the sink users.  You don’t even need to double the amount of dispensers, just move it in between sinks and boom, problem solved.

So a couple quick changes to these bathrooms and they’re all good.  Does that mean you shouldn’t use them?  Hell no.  If I was an underclassman that had enough financial assistance to be able to live in the South Campus dorms, I’s definitely prefer to use the ECC bathrooms over the probably gross communal ones you share with your weird, unsanitary suitemates.  It’s pretty much on the way to where all your classes are going to be anyway.  Other than that and actually doing something at there, its location is kind of a breaker for me getting a lot of use out of this spot.

After entering the code to unlock the door, we hustled into the bathroom-shower complex shared by the resident UW track bros and soccer bros.  Things hadn’t changed since the last time I was there.  It was still the shithole it had presumably always been.  The entire complex is lined with small beige bathroom tiles that could probably afford to be cleaned with a pressure washer soon.  Because there’s obviously no windows, the ventilation is nonexistent, meaning the bathroom smells perpetually of butt sweat and butt poop.

There’s five toilets in the bathroom section, as opposed to zero in the shower section (this still hasn’t stopped anyone from peeing in the shower while everyone else is watching).  All of them technically have their own private stall with the addition of some wall dividers, but the two closest to the sinks neither have doors on the stalls nor toilet seats, with the understanding that you pee in those.  The other three, fortunately, are equipped with the aforementioned hinged accessories.  There is a 90% chance that at least one of these three toilets will have been left unflushed regardless of the time of day.

Despite how awful my old locker room bathrooms were, it was refreshing to go back and reflect on the good times and camaraderie, the kinds of memories that you make with a group of people only when you’re suffering together, like when you go camping in the rainforest or fight in a war.  Apparently the men’s track locker room is the only one without any wall-mounted flat screen TV now, but I guess it’s in the middle of a renovation now, so there will be some (read: multiple wall-mounted flat screen TVs) installed in a couple months.  These will no doubt exclusively air SportsCenter cycles and Wiz Khalifa music videos for eternity.

Most of y’alls would be looking at this as a downer.  How you gonna be able to poop when your house is devoid of TP?  But I am optimistic about this prospect because this now increases my propensity to use the bathrooms on campus more often to this blog’s agenda.  There is only one small inconvenience to this and that I have to plan my digestive schedule to best accommodate my class schedule, but to me that is a small price to pay for the advancement of the blog and for all the money I’ll be saving by not buying my own toilet paper.

So the bathroom of choice today was Miller Hall, which is a building in the quad.  I have a class on the third floor there once a week this quarter so it’s been incorporated into my rotation for a minute.  This has given me ample moments to observe the dynamics of this particular restroom.

First observation: there is always, always, always an old dude in there.  What department does Miller house?  I don’t think I’ve seen that many old dudes in one building at once, and that’s saying something considering I’ve spent a lot of time in ESRM buildings.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with old dudes.  It’s not like I hate them or anything.  They do have the tendency to give absolutely no fucks about how loudly they poop, which I greatly admire but is also really gross.  Every once in a while I have to hold the door for an old dude passing through, and the series of eye contact and giving of thanks can be very awkward.

Second observation: really big windows.  The entire south wall is a series of windows.  Not enough bathrooms use this to their advantage, especially the upper-floor ones that don’t have to deal with lookers-on.  The natural light is a pleasant change-up from the eyesore CFL’s they’re putting in every room.  With that being said, it doesn’t get very good ventilation for whatever reason, so it smells pretty dank every time I go in there.

Third observation: imbalance in water dynamics.  The urinals in Miller 3 are super old-school ones that use 472 gallons of water per flush and look like toilet bowls mounted onto the wall that you pee in.  But seriously there’s an obscene amount of water in there for a urinal.  There can’t possibly be a need for all that water.  I think that other people notice this as well, and this has led to a sense of guilt regarding flushing 472 gallons of water for each use.  Ultimately the result of this is that people don’t flush the urinals half the time, which is pretty gross, but if water conservation is more of your thing, it may be worth the sacrifice.

This is in direct contrast to the toilets in the stalls, which use a pathetic amount of water so as to ensure a double flush.  Double flushes are typically reserved for the poops that you’re proudest of.  The need to double baby flush everything in Miller waters down the sense of accomplishment of a double flush poop (DFP) to something much less than it should be.

Observation four: this is one of the larger bathrooms on campus, and I think is the only men’s bathroom between the second and third floors in Miller.  This means that it gets a lot of traffic.  If you are the timid type, avoid this place at all costs.  There’s never been an instance where I’ve had the place to myself.  The old dudes that use it genuinely do not care about your bathroom well-being and will shit as loudly as they please.  There’s usually pee in the urinals.  The smell is a little funky.  And the decor is nothing to write home about, except for the windows.  There’s not a lot to gain from using Miller 3.  This is an advanced-level bathroom, not for the faint at heart.

Every once in a while (maybe 3 or 4 times per academic quarter) I feel the need to be extremely productive, the desire to do so being fed by doing nothing for the previous three weeks. When this feeling hits me one of my go-to spots to crank out work is the Engineering Library.  This is for numerous reasons. First, everyone that studies here is smarter than me, so I feel like I need to step up my academic game whenever I go here. Second, it’s probably the overall quietest building on campus. Pretty much the only noise you hear is mouse clicks or a group study session in one of the study rooms. The thing about their noise is that they’re actually studying as opposed to debating the attractiveness of the Franco brothers or watching Netflix on the TV’s (both of which are commonly observed phenomena in PACCAR and Odegaard). The study group right by me is trying to get everyone to use the Taylor series to do crazy engineering shit. Basically the Engineering Library has the “everyone here is smarter than me so I need to try to not be the dumbest, most unproductive person here” effect so I use it to my advantage.

The only catch with ELB is that the bathrooms are gender-segregated by floor; men’s restrooms are located on floors 1 and 3, while female restrooms are on 2 and 4. So obviously there’s no girls on the third floor and vice-versa for the second and fourth floors. This may not even be considered a hindrance to some people because studying with or in close proximity to the opposite sex is distracting. Right now some of y’alls might be thinking “Lol engineering girls are ugly they’re not a distraction” but just remember that they’re probably going to be a lot more successful than you when we’re all in our thirties. My biggest gripe with the men’s room being on the third floor is that I have to walk up two flights of stairs.

It’s a little tricky to locate as it’s on the other side of the floor from the stairwell. Once you walk in, you realize that this bathroom was made for efficiency. Six urinals in an alcove on opposite walls make for get-in-get-out usage. There’s a little privacy for the stalls, as they’re tucked away in a corner. Each sink has its own soap dispenser, which is such a small detail but it means that you don’t have to drip water in between sinks and get water all over the floor. The only caveat is that the paper towels are to the side of the sink area, so you’re going to get minor hand-drip floor saturation (abbreviated HDFS in academic circles).

Being that this is the Engineering Library, the layout of the building is functional and everything but I’m pretty sure Riker’s Island has nicer interiors than this place. The only updates this place has gotten since it was built is the installation of computers and a larger publication volume. Some might consider it drab but others would say that out of nothing comes everything. 

Happy Dead Week to all.

It’s been a long time coming for a review on a bathroom in Odegaard, the infamous undergraduate student library. Built in 1973, a short time later it was revealed by Carl Sagan as being one of the most difficult places in the Solar System to be productive. There are more means of distraction within those confines than there are water molecules in the oceans. These are numbers of epic proportion we are talking about here. People have been known to become institutionalized after spending too much time trying to get him or herself to actually study. You get the point. Odegaard is a hellhole for myriad reasons. Why is this so? Was this always the case? Japanese scientists are trying to build supercomputers to handle the algorithms used to determine these factors as we speak and have been unsuccessful thus far.

Most UW students avoid going into Odegaard at all costs unless they absolutely have to. My reason for coming here was one of desperation – I needed to use Adobe CS6, which I can’t afford to have installed on my laptop, and my roommate chokes my connection speed if I try to torrent anything had I chosen to obtain it illegally. This left me with no choice, so off I went.

Basically, if you’re foolish enough to attempt to be productive in Odegaard, you put on headphones and drown out any and all background noise and try to work on something until you have to pee. When you reach the point of squirming in your seat and being 100% positive that if you don’t pee in the next 7 seconds you’ll wet yourself, then you hastily pack up your things, or ask your friends (which explains why you’re not studying) or, much more awkwardly, the girl studying next to you to watch your stuff as you rush to the nearest bathroom. In my case today I was on the second floor, so after three hours of intense photoshopping, I logged out of my clutch dual screen station and booked it to the bathroom to the left of the checkout desk.

Odegaard got an interior renovation last year to celebrate its 40^th year of existence. This was much needed because the place was pretty shabby looking and the bathrooms ran par with truck stop gas stations in terms of quality. It was really a shock despite all the renovations being done that the bathrooms essentially remained unchanged. If Michael K. Young or any other member of the ad board had gone inside the 1^st floor bathroom for more than 0.2 seconds they likely would have hired a demolition team to blow the thing up and start from scratch just to render that it extinct for the rest of time, but they didn’t because the administrative building has kickass bathrooms (one of which I reviewed a while back) and never had to bother, so now the new Ode bathrooms are virtually unchanged.

Needless to say I was incredibly disappointed with my experience in Odegaard 2. For one it’s small, with only two urinals, two sinks, and a stall. The other glaring issue is the fact that the urinals are in the direct line of sight from the door, so to compensate for this, a divider was installed to obstruct the view. This in turn makes an incredibly awkward urinal corral with a narrow enough entrance that you get uncomfortably close to passersby. It didn’t really smell that great either because it’s a small bathroom handling a large and constant stream of traffic day after day. It just doesn’t work.

At the end of the day, Odegaard is just a terrible place in general and its bathrooms are no exception, even after an extensive interior remodeling. There should be no reason for anyone to ever go in there unless you’re checking out a book. It’s loud and crowded and you won’t get work done due to the innumerable distractions at hand. The University of Washington has thirteen other libraries all across campus, and all of them are infinitely better than Odegaard as places to study. If you need to study until 2am then just do it at your house or don’t procrastinate. There’s no reason you should ever be here, unless you lack any shred self-respect (which explains why I’m here).

The men’s bathroom is located at the very beginning of this tiled hallway and you can tell that the building was modified at some point in time to accommodate restrooms for the male gender, since there wasn’t any use for one back in the day. That would be super weird to be in a building where there would be no bathrooms to cater to your gender, since that was totally the case for a lot of buildings and places not even 100 years ago. Weird. Regardless, my bowels are certainly thankful today that we have moved past the whole gender inequality thing.

Long story short, this bathroom kicks all kinds of ass. It starts off with an automated light system, a feature particularly useful when you really have to pee but are carrying heavy things in both your hands. There’s only one stall, which I think works for the building because it seems to be pretty underused compared to other buildings on campus, and one urinal. The whole thing was spotless and was devoid of bathroom-associated olfactory features.

In addition to finding a super clutch bathroom, today I encountered a UW Bathrooms first: a shower. In a room the size of the bathroom area there’s a little shower stall in the corner. This certainly was a remnant of the women’s-only gym days and I’m not really sure who would use it in the present day, but I’m positive that somebody regularly puts it to good use. You’d for sure make up an excuse to use the bathroom shower if you went to that building often enough.

Since there is a shower in the room and the floor and walls are lined with tile, there’s a little drain in the middle of the room. This implies that you could pee all over the floor and wall and it’ll just get washed down the drain when you rinse off the surfaces with the shower. People have undoubtedly done this, perhaps in a time of desperation, or perhaps for recreation. People get off to those kinds of things, you know.  Did the thought of someone doing exactly that in an exercise of their free will affect my perceptions of this bathroom?  Of course not.  When you find a bathroom as awesome as this one you’ll easily overlook the minor imperfections.