Greek Week Special PACCAR – “Where the Heels Meet the Yoga Pants”

Salutations to all UWBathrooms readers!

As some recent posts alluded, the University of Washington is presently involved in that unique bastion of Panhellenic service and inter-fraternal harmony: Greek Week. With that in mind, I hope all you frat-tanked readers “pre-funked” for this review: it’s the Paccar Hall bathroom drinking game.

Pretty simple, anytime I reference a excretory bodily function… consume the beverage of your choice.  Perhaps you’ll be using this review sooner than you expected.

Paccar Hall is the gleaming box of sexiness that stands in juxtaposition to the damp pile of asbestos – Denny Hall. Paccar is a place with dry-erase walls, Starbucks coffee, well-groomed MBA students and – most of all – overflowing entrepreneurship.  As I step into the tiled bathroom nearest to the food stand, I am hoping that “entre” is the only thing overflowing in this I-Robot-esque edifice.

A quick survey of the landscape yields some bizarre observations.   All four towel dispensers are located right inside the door, and they exhibit a bijection with the trashcans. Each paper towel dispenser gets its own waste bin? I shake my head as I walk past – someone should run some cost-effectiveness analysis on that. Tsk Tsk.

I choose the standie with an anarchy symbol painted right above it. We are the 99%, I think to myself.  Hopefully every suit that steps up to this urinal looks up at that silly ska-punk graffiti, considers all the skateboarding he gave up for life of bean-counting, zips up, and walks away with a day’s worth of ennui…

Alas, Sharpie is just Sharpie, and business goes on as usual. Speaking of business – this bathroom has plenty of options for doing it – three luxury stalls and five spacious standies with all the room needed to check the market on your smartphone.

The final touch on any bathroom is the mirror. That rare moment of literal reflection  is as vital as any other action in the restroom. Paccar’s mirror is large enough for all the future CEOs to “powder their nose”  just fine, and the counter is a tasteful luxury apropos of its context.

Paccar Hall’s cafeteria bathroom has a spirit of coming and going. Some might argue this is the true nature of visiting the toilet. Yet, like a bladder-relieved Midas, I felt an emptiness (not of the urological variety). The Paccar bathroom truly has style, but it lacks in substance. The waste of paper, the depressing and melancholy-inducing graffiti. This is not the bathroom it appears to be. Though – like its prominent mirror – it obliges us to contemplate ourselves.

PACCAR near Orin’s Place

3.25 deep thoughts out of a lifetime of wonder.

PS  – I realize that I not once mentioned human waste. I figure that this is Greek Week, and my post might be the only thing you’ve read in the past three days besides drunk texts. But here’s a couple for the road: poopie, caca, wee-wee.