Hi! I’m Julia Haworth, a first-year Communications major. Last semester, Neassa Hunt began writing bathroom reviews, but she has since graduated, and so I’m taking up bathroom reviews this semester! Enjoy!
Ah. The First-Year Village. From the rotting food and unwashed dishes in the Fireside demo kitchen, to the broken-down pool table with the sketchy cues in the Trustees game room, it’s home sweet home! But it holds a dark, smelly secret: the dorm bathrooms.
All the First-Year dorm bathrooms have the same set-up: two to four showers on one side, two to four toilets on the other, and four sinks in the middle. I don’t even want to start on about the single-use gender neutral bathrooms, which is like Satan’s personal torture chamber for people with good hygiene.
Walking into the First-Year bathrooms is like a game of Russian roulette: you never know what you’re going to get when you pull back a shower curtain, open a stall door, go to wash your hands in the sink, or even what smell you get when you step in the door. You could get flowery soap, the crappy Axe that someone doused themselves in, or last night’s dinner sitting unflushed in some toilet.
Bringing in a whole bucket of cleaning supplies and Clorox wipes is essential to having a comfortable, sanitary toilet experience. Unfortunately, us students are either too broke to afford that, too lazy to think about it, or both. Opening up the stall doors to cautiously peer in is totally like that game show where you had to pick a door, and you got whatever was behind that door. “Behind door number one — it’s spontaneous and sleazy, it’s a jizz covered toilet seat folks!” And the list goes on to pee soaked floors, unflushed toilets, etc. My ultimate quest in life has changed from ending global warming to finding a clean, dry toilet where I only have to put one layer of toilet paper over the seat.
The showers are another nightmare. It’s just like that classic horror movie scene, where the killer pulls back the shower curtain and there’s a screaming naked girl, but instead you’re the screaming naked girl pulling back the curtain, and whatever trap the devil set up for you is behind it: hairy shower drains, mysterious crusty substances on the walls, wet towels, gross chunky tile floors, and sometimes the stall just smells like straight ass (a shower’s purpose is to make you clean, so why would it smell like that?).
We finally reach the sinks, the hidden disaster within this special hell reserved for us. From unwashed spit and boogers, to pasta noodles and grimy dental floss, you can’t ever look down into the sink bowl when you wash your hands. The weak water pressure refuses to break through the layers of dried toothpaste, and with no paper towels in sight, cleaning it is not in anyone’s best interest, unless it’s with a three-foot pole.
The First-Year Village bathrooms do have some positives: sometimes one is lucky enough to find a decently clean shower, a dry toilet seat, or a bearable looking sink. It would be a much nicer bathroom if the people making use of such facilities can figure out how to use it. As nice as they look, it’s just as deceiving as the people on “Catfish.” This rating is a 2/10 from me folks.
