Foreword

UW Bathrooms was a blog started by Aaron, Danny, and Zian­na. Togeth­er, they went around campus trying differ­ent bath­rooms and wrote about their experiences.

The blog ran from 2012 to 2016 and captured the zeit­geist of UW during those years. In this archive, you’ll find period mark­ers like the authors’ reac­tions to the newly reno­vated HUB and their thoughts on UW’s new gender neutral bath­rooms. You’ll also find that certain things are time­less — like CHEM 142 and the strug­gle of complet­ing ALEKS on Friday nights, or the jokes about frat boys and Paccar Hall.

While UW Bath­room’s reviews were few and far between, they were always inter­est­ing and funny. This archive is a dedi­ca­tion to the blog, and to the people who created it.

Sup UW

To start things off, this blog lives and dies by the the follow­ing mantra: when­ever you have to go to the bath­room, we know you’d much rather go to a clean, nice-look­ing one than a dirty one. This is where this website comes in. We go around campus, use all the bath­rooms in each build­ing, and report back with our expe­ri­ences and opin­ions about them. Ulti­mate­ly, we want to come up with the best and worst bath­room in each build­ing on campus. Why, you ask? Let us start with asking you a ques­tion or two. Have you ever had to poop before/­dur­ing/after a class and you picked a stanky-ass bath­room and it made your poop that much less enjoy­able? Did some funny bath­room graf­fiti ever make you laugh out loud and make the guy stand­ing by the urinal next to you uncom­fort­able? Did you ever wander around a build­ing you’ve only been in a couple times trying to find a bath­room but got lost and could­n’t find it? Has bath­room anxi­ety ever para­lyzed your lower intes­tine because fart­ing around other people makes you embar­rassed? Don’t lie, we know that shit’s happened to you before.

The bottom line is that you’re going have to go to the bath­room, so being armed with the knowl­edge of know­ing where the cleanest, best-s­melling, most secluded bath­rooms are on campus could poten­tially make or break your expe­ri­ence. It might even save your life.

We are going to use the follow­ing method to deter­mine the best and worst bath­rooms on campus:

1. Choose a bathroom somewhere on campus that we haven’t previously reviewed.
2. Use said bathroom, qualitatively observing the categories of cleanliness, visuals/aesthetics, olfaction, traffic, and miscellaneous, as well as documenting the overall experience as inoffensively, but hilariously (if the experience permits) as possible.

We see a couple prob­lems with this right off the bat. The first one we have iden­ti­fied is that we have no basis for review­ing women’s restrooms. The second prob­lem is that our sched­ules will strongly bias which bath­rooms we will tend to use the most. We hope to correct these prob­lems by a) find­ing a girl to join our review board and b) be more adven­tur­ous with our bath­room selec­tion in an attempt to capture the spirit of the website. And obvi­ously we’re not going to post as much during any midterms and finals that we have. We also real­ize that we’re going to run out of synonyms and euphemisms for peeing and poop­ing at some point, so don’t get offended if we just refer to our “busi­ness” as such. Besides, using the words “pee” and “poop” are funnier than the polit­i­cally correct terms.

– Aaron, Danny, and Zianna