I’m a pretty go-with-the-flow kind of person most of the time, but when I step foot into a bathroom I have a long list of things that I can’t stand, and unfortunately the school’s bathrooms pretty much cover all of them.

The architecture of the bathrooms here on campus are less than optimal, with acoustics that are better than the band room and not even a door to muffle the smallest whisper of a sound as it resonates throughout campus.

Also, let’s not forget to mention the uncomfortable arrangement of the boys and girls bathrooms that have led to countless wrong-bathroom stories. I just don’t understand why the girls bathroom is sometimes on the right, but sometimes on the left. It makes maneuvering through the halls during that 5 minute passing period with a full bladder even more stressful.

And then once you’re finished, assuming you ended up in the right bathroom, you walk out only to make extremely uncomfortable eye contact with that guy from 6th period that just happened to be leaving the boys bathroom at that precise moment. I don’t understand why both bathrooms share an entrance because the last moment I want to run into a guy at school is when I’m drying my hands on my pants.

Which leads me to my main issue with public bathrooms that isn’t isolated to the halls of the school: electric hand dryers.

Why?

They don’t work.  At least they don’t if you have less than three million years to dry your hands, and seeing as we’re expected to fit all of our bathroom breaks into our 5 minute passing periods- ain’t nobody got time for that.

I mean, are paper towels too much to ask for?

I don’t see why these new-fangled hand-drying robots are all that great. They’re not really that much more environmental – they use more energy than it takes to create paper towels. They’re not more efficient, and they don’t promote cleanliness. Kids all over the school have turned to Germ-x in their desperate time of need for a faster alternative to those screaming boxes of metal.

Especially towards the end of the year, it is increasingly more common to walk into the bathroom and find posters with bold face type reading “DO NOT USE HAND DRYERS DURING TESTING.”

Administration is literally forcing us to either dry our hands on our clothing and walk around with wet hand prints for the next thirty minutes or make do with a squirt of off-brand hand sanitizer that may or may not do it’s intended purpose.

We can’t forget the incident of 2012 when someone allegedly replaced the contents of a school hand-sanitizer-dispenser-thingy with his/her own urine. After that rumor made it’s rounds, many students were traumatized and now have anxieties and fears every time they place their hand under the nozzle, praying a foam cleanser is what will fall into their palm.

Paper towels don’t create a distraction during a testing environment, and no prankster could find a way to replace them with their own waste.

I dare anyone to convince me that paper towels aren’t the best option for public hand drying, and until administration can see eye to eye with me on this one, I’ll just have to keep my trusty washcloth in my backpack.