Some restrooms on ULM campus, more often the men’s than the ladies’ rooms, discourage use rather than provide a place for it.
These restrooms are usually the ones in the older buildings like Admin or Stubbs, the ones your parents and grandparents visited when the Indians, not Warhawks, were campus chiefs.
It’s easy to dismiss the state of the nearest restroom when rushing from one class to another. But when someone else brings it up over lunch, you consider avoiding restrooms in buildings like Hanna or Garrett Hall.
If you’re desperate, you close your eyes and hold your breath as you unzip.
You won’t find a “Beware of Dog” door sign on these restrooms. But you might as well visit the doghouse as you lift up the broken stall door to close it or turn the sink knobs and find neither soap dispensers nor mirrors where you expect them.
In the Stubbs’ ladies’ room, there’s a full body mirror on a wall that matches the floor’s pink tile. Check into the men’s room and take care not to slide across portions of yellow tile that’s darker than the rest.
It’s a sign of the times past you note, with cracked, defaced partitions that recall the last days of the Berlin Wall.
We began our restroom inspection looking for the best restrooms on campus but we ended up finding the worst.
All the best restrooms looked the same: from the clean and hardly used on the upper floors of the ULM Library to the well-kept ones in the Student Union Building and the Hemphill Airway and Computer Science Building.
These newer buildings had larger and cleaner restrooms. Usually, you can spot a janitor cart nearby regardless of the time of day. There might even be a resident janitor cart in the back of the restroom like the ones at the entrance of Biedenharn.
It’s not a lack of cleaning that made buildings like Admin, a central hub for current and incoming students, get a reputation on campus for its restrooms.
Sometimes people don’t flush and when you’re the first one to enter a restroom in the morning, you hope nothing stayed overnight. Especially if you’re a guy and you know there’s a row of four urinals in there.
The restrooms in Garrett Hall smell awful. But so does the rest of the building—the Biology department resides there and who knows what sort of creature they’re dissecting on any given day, not to mention the dead ones they keep for their students to see.
It’s hard to see in the restrooms in Hanna Hall where the lights are cornered and dimmed. There’s just enough light to squint at the graffiti, which predates social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
It’s no wonder handwriting on the stall walls became a means of crossing the urinal divide—in Hanna, you certainly can’t see the other guy.
Some restrooms, like the glorified outhouses by Brown Stadium’s Track and Field, are more like tests of your need.
Try to ignore the ceiling-to-wall cobwebs, the mysterious odors and the cockroach committee in the corner.
