Bathroom Business

One little quirk of the campus where I work is that all the men's restrooms are on the first floor and all of the women's restrooms are on the second floor. It's an oddly designed building in general - it's very M.C. Escher-esque in its various staircases and levels - but the bathroom thing was just plain poor planning. When I first got there a year and a half ago, I wandered all over the second floor near my office looking for the bathroom and couldn't figure out where they all were. Finally, someone told me I had to head downstairs.

Anyway, at the beginning of this academic year, the president of the college announced that they would be adding bathrooms on each floor so there was something for everyone on each level. That announcement got the biggest round of applause during the whole meeting.

So I've been watching the progress of these restrooms over the last couple of months and it's been fascinating. The facilities won't be the same size as the already established bathrooms - they're actually converted storage rooms. But they've gone from bare, stripped-to-the-bones spaces to finished rooms.

I've watched the sheet rock guys, the tile guys, the electricians, and the plumbers do their thing and, to me, they're freaking wizards. They're like the athletes of construction. It astounds me how some people can just build stuff. My brother and Dad have rebuilt whole houses from the ground up and they, along with the bathroom guys, just seem like magic to me.

I can write an essay. I'm pretty good with metaphors. I can grade a paper in mere minutes. But install tile? Plumb a toilet? That's the magic.