Students have to poop, it’s part of campus life. Whether it’s five minutes after eating at Panda Express in the Student Union Memorial Center or during a lecture in the Social Sciences building, going to the bathroom is factored into our daily lives.
Although, if nature calls when you’re on campus, things can sometimes get messy.
The University of Arizona has more than 100 individual toilets on its campus, but none of those bathrooms are as filthy and all around repulsive as those inside the Main Library.
When walking into one of the bathrooms on any of the five floors of the library, it resembles the aftermath of a malicious attack.
Toilet paper is strung on the floor like a white-trash red carpet at an Oscar premiere and an overwhelming foul smell contaminates the air. There’s graffiti plastered on the walls and the stall doors give users a smack in the face every time they sit down.
While the toilets are often clogged from overuse of toilet paper, the trash cans frequently overflow with used paper towels that find their way onto the floor and eventually stick to the bottom of your shoes, resulting in an even more annoying experience.
This could all be tolerated if there wasn’t one thing that pushes me over the edge. On more than one occasion, I have walked into the bathroom on the fourth floor of the Main Library to find not only urine splattered across the already soiled floor, but also feces laced on toilet seats.
Whether this is the fault of the custodial staff that “sometimes” clean the guts of the library each day, or the fault of a few immature UA students who never learned how to aim, the bowels of the bathrooms are heinous. In fact, it could even be that due to the UA being public and open to everyone, the library could be contaminated with a wide spread profusion of homeless people that can often be spotted doing nothing but drooling over the Manuel T. Pacheco Integrated Learning Center computers to watch porn. The homeless could be using these toxic waste dumps of bathrooms to not only relieve themselves, but to shower as well. In such a public place, it could be any of these reasons.
Regardless of whose shoulders the fault falls on, these bathrooms are absolutely putrid and should be taped off from the rest of campus. The fact is, the confines of these lavatories are the worst on the entire UA campus and should be avoided at all possible costs.
Students, if you must poop in a public bathroom, don’t use the Main Library bathrooms, because then you might have to throw up too.
—Robert Alcaraz is the visuals editor. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu or on Twitter via @WildcatOpinions.
