I’m BACK IN THIS. You thought I slept on this blog didn’t you? The truth is, I don’t sleep anymore. All I do is take prolonged naps. You think I’m sleep­ing but then I sense a distur­bance in my brain’s alpha waves and then BOOM I’m writ­ing blog posts while in the mean­time you’re taking pictures of your coffee foam the barista with thick­-rimmed glasses frames made into a heart shape and post­ing all of them on Instagram.

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.