Hutchin­son Hall is another build­ing I had never stepped foot in before until today. Back in the day, it used to be the women’s gym in the pre-IMA and pre-gen­der equal­ity days. Now it houses the drama depart­ment, which has its own, albeit small, library. Suppos­edly there is a swim­ming pool in here from back in the days of it being a gym. If there is or not, there certainly was one at some point in time because part of the build­ing has a hall­way lined in those mini tiles that are typi­cally found in the hall­ways between the locker room and swim­ming pool in a multi­tude of exer­cis­ing facil­i­ties. In the case of Hutchin­son, these hall­ways lead not to tile-lined depres­sions filled with chlo­ri­nated water, but rather, faculty offices.

The men’s bath­room is located at the very begin­ning of this tiled hall­way and you can tell that the build­ing was modi­fied at some point in time to accom­mo­date restrooms for the male gender, since there wasn’t any use for one back in the day. That would be super weird to be in a build­ing where there would be no bath­rooms to cater to your gender, since that was totally the case for a lot of build­ings and places not even 100 years ago. Weird. Regard­less, my bowels are certainly thank­ful today that we have moved past the whole gender inequality thing.

Long story short, this bath­room kicks all kinds of ass. It starts off with an auto­mated light system, a feature partic­u­larly useful when you really have to pee but are carry­ing heavy things in both your hands. There’s only one stall, which I think works for the build­ing because it seems to be pretty under­used compared to other build­ings on campus, and one urinal. The whole thing was spot­less and was devoid of bath­room-associated olfactory features.

In addi­tion to find­ing a super clutch bath­room, today I encoun­tered a UW Bath­rooms first: a show­er. In a room the size of the bath­room area there’s a little shower stall in the corner. This certainly was a remnant of the women’s-only gym days and I’m not really sure who would use it in the present day, but I’m posi­tive that some­body regu­larly puts it to good use. You’d for sure make up an excuse to use the bath­room shower if you went to that build­ing often enough.

Since there is a shower in the room and the floor and walls are lined with tile, there’s a little drain in the middle of the room. This implies that you could pee all over the floor and wall and it’ll just get washed down the drain when you rinse off the surfaces with the show­er. People have undoubt­edly done this, perhaps in a time of desper­a­tion, or perhaps for recre­ation. People get off to those kinds of things, you know. Did the thought of some­one doing exactly that in an exer­cise of their free will affect my percep­tions of this bath­room? Of course not. When you find a bath­room as awesome as this one you’ll easily over­look the minor imperfections.