After four long years of an abusive relationship with McGill campus public restrooms, it’s time for me to speak out about the frustration, the repulsion, and the anger they have caused me. Too many times have I entered the facilities on the ground floor of Redpath across from the fishbowl and found myself wanting to just go home and douse myself in bleach.
It’s undeniable that the McLennan-Redpath complex bathrooms are the most offensive on campus. Toilets covered in garbage bags, carelessly constructed out-of-order signs, and toilet paper that would even be deemed unfit for jail cells characterize each stall, from the most frequently visited in the basement outside of the Cybertheque, all the way up to the illogically miniscule facilities on the sixth floor. Discovering that only two of the five stalls in the basement are working while florescent lights scream at your eyes only enhances the usual library frustration levels to a new degree. And you can’t help but feel extremely uncomfortable on the sixth floor as anywhere from two to seven people are quietly waiting outside of the single stall listening to your every move.
In other campus bathrooms, one can’t help but feel that there was an utter lack of logic when the blueprints were being drafted. Highlighter yellow doors in the Education Building to match the brick walls? Why not. Seven hundred and fifty stalls in the quiet basement of Leacock? Sure. Two-hundred students eat lunch at Bronfman every day? Two stalls will be fine. In all of these, though, the most striking facility I have come across is the women’s bathroom on the second floor of the Otto Maas Chemistry Building. Upon entry, the first thing I noticed was a formerly-used urinal covered up by the typical bathroom fix-it tool: the garbage bag. Regardless, I admired the soft pink tiling surrounding the entire bathroom, reminding me of some sort of ideal early’90s bathroom a teenage girl would have.
Unfortunately, the widespread gender separation of washroom facilities has reduced my knowledge of men’s correspondence with McGill’s bathrooms to myth, hearsay, and stories of personal experience. One of the most prevalent bathroom commentaries is the story of “Sean Turner,” a student who had his name plastered over stalls across campus as a practical joke, sparking a widespread bathroom graffiti epidemic, and ultimately elevating this elusive character to campus celebrity status. That’s about as far as my knowledge goes for the men’s rooms, but I can assume they don’t have marble floors, gold sinks, magazine racks, or silk couches.
McGill finds new and exciting ways to perplex us every day. Maybe the unruly bathrooms are just another one of those character-building exercises to prepare us for the big, bad, harsh world out there. If we have problems tolerating a stinky bathroom, then we will have problems in the professional world too, right? Maybe, maybe not, but one thing’s for sure: I won’t be returning to the second floor bathroom of the Otto Maas Chemistry Building anytime soon.
