Greet­ings fellow restroom connoisseurs!

My deep­est and sincer­est apolo­gies for my lack of partic­i­pa­tion in the review process thus far. But don’t fret! As Aaron so eloquently described me in a previ­ous blog, I am a vast reser­voir of awkward­ness, so natu­rally I have a virtu­ally eter­nal flow of awkward restroom encoun­ters. My review style will be slightly differ­ent from my male coun­ter­parts for one reason, I’m shy. There­for privacy often over­rules the over­all aesthetic qual­ity of the facil­i­ties when it comes to rank­ing bath­rooms in my personal life. Be aware of this bias, however I shall also do my best to incor­po­rate a holis­tic approach to my reviews.

Shall I begin? Today began as any normal day in my life would. I woke up an hour later than I had intend­ed, and rushed to hell (Ode­gaard Under­grad­u­ate Research Library) to use a comput­er, as my laptop has previ­ously left this world and entered the next. RIP tacky wood grained Gate­way, you are sorely missed L. After a piti­ful attempt to complete two weeks worth of research in an hour and a half, I jour­neyed to Hutchin­son Hall the home of the drama depart­ment. As I awkwardly awaited a meet­ing with my thesis advi­sor I thought, what’s worse: post­ing up uncom­fort­ably in the hall as I pretend to appear enter­tained on my cell phone, or mean­der to the restroom and relieve myself of my glass of orange juice I had consumed for break­fast? As I proceeded into the horri­bly small, orangey bath­room my imme­di­ate reac­tion was “dear God, it’s worse than Odegaard!”

This bath­room is tiny, crammed full with two stalls, one sink and one paper towel dispenser. Even IKEA could­n’t make use of such a small amount of space. The walls and floor are so very burnt orange, and every­thing is so old. Not old like, wow this has a lot of char­ac­ter. But old like that nasty 70’s couch at your grand­par­ents house that you never wanted to sit on. The toilet in the hand­i­cap stall is a finicky flush­er, you have to hold the handle up (not down) until it has finished flush­ing, or else you are in danger of being the jerk who left a soggy wad of toilet paper and human waste to be discov­ered by the next unfor­tu­nate soul to jour­ney into such a sad stall. The minus­cule sink, paper towel dispenser and often over­flow­ing garbage can are squished in close prox­im­ity to the wall. In short, you must essen­tially play a game of Twister against the bath­room in order to prop­erly sani­tize your hands and throw away your paper towel. The bonus chal­lenge is to do all of this with­out touch­ing the ever grow­ing moun­tain of germ ridden, moist, discarded paper towels.

For the vast major­ity of you, I’m sure that the Drama Build­ing is like Antar­tica or the Sahara Desert. A place filled with adven­ture and the eccen­tric, and a place that you will prob­a­bly never visit. So I will famil­iar­ize you with a bit of the layout and histo­ry. When Hutchin­son was orig­i­nally constructed it was the women’s gym. (Science had yet to prove that girls do not have cooties. Also, this was prior to the creation of yoga pants). Because it used to be a gym, the layout is very strange and some rooms still have the orig­i­nal basket­ball court floors. In short, despite my aimless wander­ing through count­less corri­dors I have yet to discover an alter­na­tive to the cramped, base­ment bath­room. I know I am not alone in my misfor­tune as this piti­ful place is highly frequented living little privacy to the shy. Over­all I would defi­nitely recom­mend avoid­ing this bath­room. Howev­er, if you are in the build­ing, it’s really the only option you have.

Until we meet again!

– Zianna