In honor of Greek Week festiv­i­ties, I decided to poop in a study­ing spot frequented by frater­ni­ties and soror­i­ties alike, Gates Hall aka. Gallagher Law Library. The reasons for the law library being such a hotspot for Greeks is not known for certain, but I hypoth­e­size that its prox­im­ity to Greek Row and its rela­tive newness are the primary bene­fac­tors. I’m actu­ally writ­ing this review up on a computer in the Law Library, and I see rela­tively low popu­la­tions of the usual frequenters. I would say that these lower numbers are a result of the debauch­ery, shenani­gans, mayhem, hocus-pocus, group picture taking, etc. that are synony­mous with Greek Week festiv­i­ties. Being a GDI, the only thing I feel like I’m miss­ing out on from the phenom­enon of rush week is free Natty Ice and and that Chingy show that a few of the frats managed to scrape up togeth­er. Fuck. I really want to see Chingy. I think that would legit­i­mately be a cool show.

On an unre­lated side note, this keyboard has stick­ers on the keys with Korean char­ac­ters next to letters or symbols. The keyboard next to mine has Chinese char­ac­ters on them. I have never seen these before and think they are pretty cool. It is inter­est­ing to see the way UW caters to its high propor­tion of inter­na­tional students, perhaps provid­ing JUSTICE for them. Is it more than coin­ci­den­tal that this display of linguis­tic JUSTICE is present in a library of LAW? I think not. But I digress.

The Law Library is located in the two base­ment floors of Gates Hall. The build­ing itself is on a slope so the under­ground floors grad­u­ally become more and more exposed to the outside in a some­what obtru­sive display of tinted glass. Pompous and flashy, you might say. Cutting-edge, you might add. I admit this is a pretty nice build­ing, given that it’s less than three years old.

The real­ity here is that the bath­rooms do not compare to the sophis­ti­cat­ed-ness of the rest of the build­ing. Some people feel that it isn’t neces­sary to have bath­room facil­i­ties on par with the rest of the build­ing. I respect­fully disagree. The bath­room should not be its own entity but should flaw­lessly tran­si­tion with the rest of the build­ing (like those goofy eyeglass­es). A smaller change in envi­ron­ment from the build­ing-bath­room gradi­ent, I will defend, will lead to better expe­ri­ences because of less need to adjust, which causes excess stress that could poten­tially temporar­ily shut down biolog­i­cal process­es. These are theo­ries and predic­tions that the labo­ra­tory and field research depart­ments at UW Bath­rooms are test­ing even as I type.

The base­ment bath­room upon entrance to the Law Library is window­less, and the lights in there are on the soft­er, dimmer side, which in some circum­stances might provide roman­tic light­ing, but in my and I postu­late most other cases it comes off as slightly ominous. This is in sharp contrast with the library itself because the entire south wall of the library is a giant fuck­ing window. The creepi­ness of the bath­room makes it seem dirt­ier than it actu­ally is, although there is a lot of water on the floor and around the sink. I attribute this to the distance of the paper towel dispenser to the sink, which is a good six feet by my estimates.

Other than the excess water satu­ra­tion and the douche bag that peed all over the toilet and didn’t fuck­ing flush, my poop wasn’t that bad. The only stall is a hand­i­capped one so you’ll never feel cramped. But for what­ever reason, the toilet paper roll hold­ers are awkwardly low and makes toilet paper retrieval more diffi­cult. Luck­i­ly, there are usually rolls on top of the TP hang­ers that you can use. On a posi­tive note, despite there being high traf­fic around the library area, there were only four people that were in the bath­room the same time as me, and that’s includ­ing seat-pisser guy and his buddy that were there before me. The two other dudes that came in were talk­ing about network­ing. If you are the gregar­i­ous type, you might be able to get hooked up with a market­ing intern­ship while you poop. You could pass them your card under­neath the stall walls.

Toilet paper and paper towel loca­tion and the eerie light­ing put me off from the Gates/Li­brary base­ment unit, but despite these minor incon­ve­niences, this bath­room is more than suit­able for use during a study break. It’ll get the job done. 3.5 out of 5 busi­ness cards from this guy.

Edit: So the keyboard I typed this out on was stick­ier than a frat house base­ment, need­less to say I made some gram­mat­i­cal errors and fixed up the ones I caught. If I misspelled some­thing, deal with it.