As a mature student I often find myself having to make frequent trips to the washroom, and even though I’m now comfortable with the layout of the school and the location of the facilities, I consistently struggled with my incontinence when I first came to campus.
Why are the washrooms hidden in some U of C buildings? Why are there no signs directing students the same way that class locations are advertised? Are toilets seen as an exercise in problem solving and bladder control by the U of C?
No longer should bathrooms be the privilege of the unignorant and those with superior plumbing detection. They are a necessity that can no longer be pushed to tangential status.
How many students will wander aimlessly after leaving during the middle of class on some fools errand of chasing down washrooms in narrow corridors and basements only to return, scores of minutes later, to the shaming eyes of classmates and instructors who are now imagining the sick, depraved activities that took that long to accomplish.
“But I couldn’t find the washroom!” the student will plead, silently, knowing that it is hopeless. They have been forever marked as some type of sub-human beast, unable to operate their own natural necessities in a reasonable amount of time.
Perhaps these new social pariahs will overcome this hurdle in their lives, but, more likely, they will not. Instead this loss in status will cause them irreparable mental harm, resulting in a lonely life drifting from town to town, selling small novelty sea shells on the corner of the movie theatre.
“Listen to the shells!” the once well-adjusted deranged psychopath will scream as the patrons leave the latest installment of the Free Willy franchise. “Lift ’em up to yer ear! Ya can hear the water! Like the flush of a toilet!”
And all because the school chose to not clarify a simple matter like bathroom directions.
Listen, I’m not saying that the school is intentionally creating these problems for students, perhaps there is a bathroom resources centre on campus whose booth I carelessly missed during orientation.
But, perhaps this lack of signage is intentional to separate the weak from the strong, those of us with superior bowel control from those of us who were forced to wear rubber pants to bed each night as a child until we “learned better.”
I for one say that the time is now and the time is right to add bathroom directional signs to the hallways of our school. If a levy is necessary to fulfill this goal, then so be it. But the university should pay this bill on its own to make up for the failure to place signs in the first place.
I dream of a campus that screams to me with every move of my head my location in relation to the lavatory. I dream of a campus where I’m not forced to walk back to MacEwan Hall to use the bathroom because I’m unfamiliar with the layout of a different facility. I dream of a campus that treats all its students equally, even those that don’t know where they are, or what’s happening in the environment around them.
But, I’m just one man. One man with a lofty, urinal cake scented dream, but one man nonetheless.
It’s time to rise up my friends, let’s make this a school that doesn’t force us to use drinking fountains, corners or stranger’s lockers to relieve ourselves.
The time is now!