“Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone…”

– Jack Kerouac, prob­a­bly talk­ing about using the crapper

The timing of UWBath­rooms’ second post finds your corre­spon­dents at the figu­ra­tive far ends of the earth. Our fledg­ling blog’s founder will be spend­ing his week­end at the PNW’s drunk­est land grant insti­tu­tion — Busch Light State Univer­sity — compet­ing in the Track & Field against the Cougs. This is a century old tradi­tion, and in the past, the contest was anal­o­gous to the UW beat­ing up its younger step-broth­er. Recent years have yielded more evenly matched scores, but one suspects that this is a result of the novel and unnerv­ing Wazzu tactic: having coun­try denizens spit at the city-folk Dawgs. Yeah, Aaron is prob­a­bly being spit at right now. I urge all read­ers to keep him in your thoughts, especially while using a UW bath­room. I suppose there is a possi­bil­ity for a remote restroom review from Pull­man, but that seems partic­u­larly diffi­cult, consid­er­ing the commonly held belief that the entire town is a toilet.

As for yours truly, I also under­took a jour­ney to bring you today’s review. Some non-UW­Bath­rooms busi­ness brought my own “busi­ness” to one of the far away locales on this sprawl­ing Seat­tle campus. The Fish­ery Sciences build­ing (FSH, collo­qui­ally pronounced “fish”) is tucked away in the South­west corner of UW, across NE Boat Street from the UW Police Station. One feels safe and reas­sured by the po-po’s presence.

By the time I had arrived at FSH, I was so tired from walk­ing all the way there that I had to pee sitting down. Your corre­spon­dents typi­cally arrive at the build­ing via King County Metro, and I would there­fore recom­mend this bath­room trek to a reader look­ing for some exer­cise. Perhaps on a rare sunny day, the FSH expe­di­tion would make for a nice date. I don’t know. Just hydrate all the way there and you’ll be ready for…

The bath­rooms, located on the NE Boat Street side are down a declined hall­way and past the drink­ing foun­tains. Take note of the hall­way: bonus points for accessibility.

Once inside the Men’s room, the male reader is not over­whelmed by the util­i­tar­ian design. Two stalls, two standies, two sinks, two mirrors. This is the Noah’s Ark of bath­rooms. Within ten cubits, I am in the larger of the stalls, owing to my afore­men­tioned weari­ness. Spacious and clean, this FSH bath­room gets more disabled access points for the construc­tion of its wheelchair stall.

Wash­ing my hands, my paper towel is the first in the wall mounted trash-can. Think­ing back, the toilet paper still had that weird trian­gu­lar starter piece on the roll. Did I pop this potty’s cher­ry? Amaz­ing. Two in the after­noon on a Thurs­day, and an unused bath­room. Either that, or kudos to the jani­to­r­ial staff. This is a whole new level of squeaky clean­li­ness, and — let me tell you — it makes a dude feel pretty good to be the first. I glance in the at-this-point-ex­pected tilted wheel­chair mirror. Points for being so conscious, but this hurts my feel­ings by making me look short.

The Fish­ery Sciences bath­room is made and broken by the age old adage — loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion. A reader may never make it out to FSH, and I can hardly recom­mend going there when nature calls. Converse­ly, its remote­ness leaves it untouched, giving the user an almost bucolic expe­ri­ence in the big city. Seri­ous­ly, if Bon Iver ever took a deuce here, he’d prob­a­bly write a bunch of songs at the same time.

FSH bath­room is notable for its virgin neat­ness, sparse func­tion­al­i­ty, and atten­tion to the needs of all restroom users. One does not leave profoundly changed, but rather satis­fac­to­rily refreshed. More bath­rooms should be like those in Fish­ery Sciences. And for that, I award this bath­room FOUR poo-poos.

Out of Five poo-poos.

– Danny