2008 Woodie Awards
Markman's Musings: Pharmacy majors don't flush
Joe Markman
Issue date: 11/6/07 Section: Editorial/Opinion
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11/06/07 -This university, in the course of seeking a $100 million endowment and receiving awards and grants in academic areas such as business and oceanography, has overlooked such rudimentary tasks as cleaning out and modernizing the basement rooms in East Hall.
I was taking notes on the mediocre bathroom facilities on the bottom level of the physics hall when my friend Pat, along for a tour of academic bathrooms, laughed in disbelief at the scene before him.
Outside the bathroom door, old vinyl filing cabinets held bottles of disinfectant, right next to a room that could have been pulled directly from the cult '80s movie "Weird Science." A half-dozen or more oscilloscopes, their tiny light bulbs and clusters of knobs covered in dust, were scattered around the room, along with electrical wire and pieces of hardware out-of-use for at least a decade.
Our bathroom tour was meant as a kind of senior send-off. An evaluation of bathrooms in the major academic buildings in order to give lavatory advice and ruminate on the end of our time at URI. Some of the bathrooms, like those in Green and Independence Halls, are, not surprisingly, clean and modern. Others, like the bathroom in East Hall that smells like a urine-filled bowl of oatmeal, are old and positioned near forgotten rooms.
In my limited research I haven't found medical proof that humans always defecate when they die, but it's been well-reported by means of pop culture. It was the subject of a "South Park" episode and is mentioned in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather."
Newborns are notorious for their excretions. And I'm not just talking about this because it's my last column and I'm resorting to shock tactics. Going to the bathroom is a fact of life, one of those things, like tying our shoes, that we do thousands of times in our lives and don't give much thought to. While we might give more credence to classes and parties, our time spent in the bathroom is precious.
That being the case, I wouldn't recommend that you spend any of your time in the second floor men's bathroom in Wales Hall.
I was taking notes on the mediocre bathroom facilities on the bottom level of the physics hall when my friend Pat, along for a tour of academic bathrooms, laughed in disbelief at the scene before him.
Outside the bathroom door, old vinyl filing cabinets held bottles of disinfectant, right next to a room that could have been pulled directly from the cult '80s movie "Weird Science." A half-dozen or more oscilloscopes, their tiny light bulbs and clusters of knobs covered in dust, were scattered around the room, along with electrical wire and pieces of hardware out-of-use for at least a decade.
Our bathroom tour was meant as a kind of senior send-off. An evaluation of bathrooms in the major academic buildings in order to give lavatory advice and ruminate on the end of our time at URI. Some of the bathrooms, like those in Green and Independence Halls, are, not surprisingly, clean and modern. Others, like the bathroom in East Hall that smells like a urine-filled bowl of oatmeal, are old and positioned near forgotten rooms.
In my limited research I haven't found medical proof that humans always defecate when they die, but it's been well-reported by means of pop culture. It was the subject of a "South Park" episode and is mentioned in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather."
Newborns are notorious for their excretions. And I'm not just talking about this because it's my last column and I'm resorting to shock tactics. Going to the bathroom is a fact of life, one of those things, like tying our shoes, that we do thousands of times in our lives and don't give much thought to. While we might give more credence to classes and parties, our time spent in the bathroom is precious.
That being the case, I wouldn't recommend that you spend any of your time in the second floor men's bathroom in Wales Hall.