The room nobody talks about

This is a post about bathrooms.

Now before you go all "ew, what?" on me, it's not a post about bathroom..er..activity, it's about how we use bathrooms all the time so they might as well be darn good and it's really annoying when they're not. It's kind of like how you spend a gargantuan percentage of your life sleeping (honestly, not as much as I'd like to) so you might as well invest in a good mattress. You don't typically get to choose your bathroom like you would a mattress, which unfortunately makes it more frustrating that you have to spend a significant part of your life in a room seemingly designed to be uncomfortable.

Not all bathrooms are bad. Some places have great bathrooms! Like my bathroom in my childhood home - great. Nice size, good smelling soap, storage, functional, etc. Some hotels have killer bathrooms, with like fancy marble and fluffy towels and all that jazz.

But the bathrooms at work are a constant source of "ugh really do I have to" in my daily life.

A little background: my office is in a really old house that was renovated some years ago into an office that is mostly functional for what we do, if not a little cramped and weird and full of stairs.

Seriously, look, these are all the stairs.

there's another flight you can't even see.

(But it does kinda look like Henry Higgins' house and it's really cool and old and interesting and I like it.)

Anyway. Back to the irrational rant about how bathrooms that are less than ideal annoy me:
There are 4 bathrooms for 5 floors:

The best bathroom is up on the 3rd floor. It's larger and the temperature is usually comfortable. The sink is really old marble and kinda cool, and there's a kinda cool old-fashioned bathtub in there that totally goes with the rest of the house. But it's all the way up on the 3rd floor, and I'm in the basement, so it's not easy to run up to quickly when I only have a minute. And everyone knows it's the best bathroom, so someone's usually in it anyway.

The 2nd floor has a bathroom technically, but it's right beside a couple of offices so no one uses it because you can hear everything. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be doing some voice therapy and hear someone using the bathroom on the other side of a door.



So it's pretty much storage instead.

The first floor has a bathroom, but the door opens up into the hallway and it's the one that all the patients use. Which means it's always being used, plus it's kind of in an awkward place. It also has a big ol' window in it that makes it very cold.

Then there's the basement bathroom. My office is in the basement, which means it makes the most sense to use this one since it's just down the hall. But, man. I am NOT a fan of this bathroom.

It's super tiny, for one thing, so you're constantly running into things with your elbows, knees, etc. The doorframe is really low, so you (well, I do, since I'm tall) even hit your head on that.

It has a giant old stained glass window in it, which is cool and all, except it's 12 degrees outside today and that window does as much good at keeping out the cold as a screen door keeps out water in a flood. So it is very very cold, on every surface. It's quite the rude awakening.

All the bathrooms have this, but the soap is the pink industrial kind, which is okay except it dries out my hands like California before this current rainstorm. And it's in a normal Softsoap pump instead of an official commercial pump on the wall, so it always falls over and whatnot and it's not foamy, and everyone knows foamy soap is the best!

All the bathrooms have this too, but the paper towels are the folded up kind that you pull out of the bottom of a dispenser. But you can't just pull out one. Nope, each time you get a towel, you get 5 more free as a bonus! Woo! So each time I dry my hands I feel like I'm hurting the earth.

Sorry, Earth.

All the bathrooms also have really really thin toilet paper, which is just lame.

And the person who replaces the toilet paper (albeit very faithfully and does a good job of keeping the bathrooms clean) is obviously an "under" person, which is just annoying because I am an "over" person, like 72% of society according to that one survey that one time. I do change it sometimes.

(there are surprisingly a lot of resources if you google "toilet paper over under." good job, america.)

It's a small thing to hate on, but when it's a daily necessity, it's just really a drag. 

So if you have a comfy bathroom with great paper towels, foamy soap, normal temperatures, and plushy toilet paper oriented in the direction you prefer, don't take it for granted. Love your bathroom.

Here's hoping you have better bathrooms in your life.