The online student news source of Lovejoy High School

The Red Ledger

The online student news source of Lovejoy High School

The Red Ledger

The online student news source of Lovejoy High School

The Red Ledger

Ditch the dryers, turn to towels

Ditch+the+dryers%2C+turn+to+towels

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.

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About the Contributor
Jayme Allen, Staff Reporter
Jayme Allen (the Original Amiga) is a pretty chill piece of flesh. She’s the Master Sergeant of the Majestics Dance Team, which is kind of cool. Her greatest accomplishment in life so far has been watching all 192 episodes of The Office within a two week period of time. She eats a lot of Taco Bell and almost all of the workers know her by name, or just  call her “you again?’” She likes to write things and hates talking to people. Her favorite color is violet and her favorite place is Disneyland. She is actually Rapunzel. True story.

Comments (3)

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  • M

    Mason CottrellMay 22, 2013 at 10:27 am

    Best Article Award goes to you Jayme Allen. I agree on everything you said. These bathrooms need to change!

    Reply
  • T

    Travis TroianiMay 21, 2013 at 8:48 am

    Paper towels are fine as long as people learn how to dry their hands without using 20 sheets of it every time they go to the bathroom

    Reply
  • M

    Michael BurdickMay 21, 2013 at 8:21 am

    Yeah, the male-female arrangement thing confused me for about six seconds until I realized the men’s room is always closest to the commons.

    Reply