In my years as a UFV student, I’ve used a lot of washrooms. Some of the bathrooms here may traumatize you, confuse you, or at the least, dampen your day and leave a weird smell in your nose. Everyone is much better off with a pleasant bathroom experience, so to save new students an unpleasant one and inform current students of what’s available to them, I’ve ranked some of UFV’s most notable women’s and gender-neutral bathrooms. Heed my wisdom.
Secret bathroom (Redacted) (Gender-Neutral)
This bathroom is excellent purely by virtue of being secret. Using this bathroom feels exactly like opening the bookshelf doors into my childhood best friend’s secret room. (Maybe my experiences are not universal.) It is remarkably clean! I have seen cleaners more often in this bathroom than in every other UFV bathroom combined. The toilets are sparkling.
10/10, would consider cheek-to-seat contact.
The salad bar (Building S) (GN) 1/10
This bathroom is weirdly long for the number of stalls it has (a feeble two). Aesthetically, it’s nicer than the average UFV bathroom. The gender neutrality of this bathroom is perhaps a lie: there are no little trash cans in the stalls, so if you are menstruating, you have to carry your used products all the way across the bathroom to the garbage can that is supposed to be for paper towel only, and hope no one is going to walk in to witness you cradling a pile of bloody trash. One time, our Creative Director found a variety of cut vegetables and fruits, unflushed, in a toilet here. Also, the water pressure in this bathroom sucks.
Nature’s bathroom: The great outdoors (Building S) (Women’s) 8/10
This may be the bathroom with the highest number of stalls, and for that it has my utmost respect. There are never lines for this bathroom. Whoever designed it must have been using all of their brain cells. The mirror situation is a setback though. I feel as though the framed photos above the sink in place of your typical bathroom mirrors are making some sort of statement on vanity and obsessions with appearances, and yet, there are two full-length mirrors to either side of the sinks. Beguiling. Nevertheless, good for mirror selfies and checking yourself out if you are okay with being conspicuous about it. The nature photos above the sink do redeem themselves by being soothing to my psyche.
Shower time (Building C) (W) 5/10
Again, this bathroom is a winner simply for the impressive amount of stalls. This is a bathroom that respects women. However, it is strangely long and, appearance-wise, terrible. Plus, one of the sinks makes a weird noise that I can only describe as a robot screaming. Inexplicably, there is a shower here. The curtain does not close.
The forgotten (Building C) (W) 7/10
No one is ever in this bathroom, so if you like privacy and use women’s washrooms, this is the bathroom for you. The fogged window in the large stall is an intriguing addition. I love the red frame. Although the bathroom’s overall aesthetic is pretty standard, in line with UFV’s outdated and washed-out appearance for bathrooms, a clear effort has been made to liven it up.
Building A long boys (Building A) (W) 8/10
Once again, it’s the many stalls that make these bathrooms winners. The long bathrooms in Building A get bonus points for having ledges to dump your stuff on while you pee, so you don’t have to hang all your stuff on the bathroom door, slowly soaking up germs. However, the paper towel bins are always overflowing — not as a janitorial failing, but because everyone who uses these washrooms is too cowardly to compress the piles of balled-up paper towels to reveal that the bin is not, in fact, that full.
This bathroom framed me for murder (Building A) (W) 0/10
The vibes in here are rancid. The abhorrent blood-washed-out-of-a-white-garment pink that saturates this bathroom is hell upon the eyes. Something about it makes my skin itch. It reminds me of a grandmother I never had. It often smells strange in here, and the tiles feel as though they will never be clean. There’s an element of claustrophobia in its design that is frankly unnecessary. To dry your hands with paper towel is to risk being hit by the door.
In one harrowing experience, a girl in the stall next to me had a whole conversation on speakerphone while she pooped.
Darkness reigns in Finnegan’s grave (Building K) (W) 6/10
Clearly, no effort has been made to convert this from a pub bathroom to a UFV bathroom, and that’s what makes this particular water closet fun and fresh. The looming doors make you feel small the minute you step into a stall, and yet the rest of the bathroom is designed to invoke claustrophobia. The dark colour scheme at times makes me feel as though I have stumbled into a bathroom in hell. And yet, the UFV logo has been stamped onto the soap dispensers to remind me where I truly am, and so the university may make its feeble mark on this washroom, which refuses to stop belonging to Finnegan’s. Graffiti remains in every stall, as if the past is ever-haunting the present. Sometimes I look at this graffiti and wonder what happened to these girls.
The poo palace (Building K) (W) 9/10
In stark contrast to its sister, this Building K bathroom is made up of light colours and open spaces. If the bathrooms at the south end of Building K are hell, these are heaven. The tall stall doors feel protective here, rather than oppressive. The black-and-white tile floors invoke nostalgia for an era I was not a part of, and give a sense of being inside a dated, charmingly tacky mansion. There is an entire section of this bathroom dedicated to mirror selfies, and for that I applaud this bathroom’s architect. They know what the people want.
There are two soap dispensers to every sink here, although I suspect this was with the intent to make UFV’s mark upon soap dispensary here, too. You will notice, of course, that while these soap dispensers seem identical to any other on UFV campus, only in Building K are they marked by the university itself.
Images: David Myles & Mikaela Collins/The Cascade
