Engineers deserve love too… and definitely inviting bathrooms.

Why are you so ugly? No honestly, I could describe you as plain, repulsive, and vomit-inducing. I could scientifically link your ugliness to every “yo mama so ugly” joke. I could even flood you (with the metal-laced water you produce) until you die and are replaced with a tolerable bathroom. And in spite of all of that, the pervasive thoughts of your disgustingness would still plague my mind, and I’d still be left with the trauma that you’ve induced.

I can vividly remember the first time we met. I was halfway through a lab and really needed to pee. I opened your door, still focusing on whatever experiment I was doing, and my mind immediately went blank. I stared at you in complete horror. Your tiled walls took Mudd’s cubic prison-inspired layout to another level. Your abundance of ceramic surfaces, coupled with your muted green color scheme, drove me back to an ’80s horror movie. I contemplated holding in my pee but, as a typical college student, I had filled my water bottle multiple times that day and my bladder was brimming. With quivering hands I entered into you, my brain screeching at me every time I touched one of your grimy surfaces, and my ears latching onto your low chuckles as you mocked my humanity.

Since then every interaction I’ve had with you has been a begrudging encounter that strips away a piece of my soul. Every time my eyes land on the cold ceramic tile of your walls I feel bile crawl up my throat. Every time I stand at those open-to-the-world urinals, any sense of individuality disappears. Each time I need to use you, I go to greater lengths to avoid using you. Then it finally hit me.

It’s not an incident that you’re so grotesque. It’s very much an active choice, meant to dehumanize and degrade engineers into the asocial, obsessive sheep that SEAS wants us to be. Why else would you be so clinical, and imprisoning, while even Hamilton’s archaic bathrooms manage to feel quaint. Every one of your features is designed to dehumanize us. Your lukewarm water oozing from the taps forces us to embrace monotony. That awkward slab of wood behind the door (which I may have walked right into multiple times) is a punishment for even daring to have bodily functions. We either submit to your filth, losing any semblance of self-worth, or we ignore our humanity, returning to our work like crazed work-mules.

I say no longer! This semester I will take 30 minute bathroom breaks, walk to buildings that CC students enjoy, and regain my humanity. What’s more, if you so much as gleam, glare, or breathe towards me I will deface your innards. I thought that you were just ugly, and I could pity that even if I could not stomach it. But now that I know you’re willingly so horrific just to mold me into your definition of an engineer, we are enemies! WE ARE ENEMIES!

Filthiness via Bwog Staff