Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

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The communal bathrooms of the AMRs seem to form a Hopkins urban legend. High school seniors wonder about them as they decide which dorm to request. Freshmen living in Buildings A/B or Wolman marvel at how their fellow freshmen cope with communal bathrooms. Some upperclassmen talk about how glad they are that they didn’t live in the AMRs and deal with communal bathrooms as freshmen.

I’ve lived in AMR I for eight months, and I haven’t caught a disease by using a communal bathroom. Communal bathroom usage isn’t luxurious, but it isn’t horrible. Sure, there are times when the bathroom floor is flooded with water. Sure, there are times when a toilet is covered with someone else’s vomit. Sure, there are times when a shower has someone else’s hair at the bottom. Still, these incidents aren’t everyday occurrences, and the housing staff cleans the bathrooms on an almost-daily basis. I’ve also found that the negative aspects of communal bathroom usage usually stem from other girls being careless and not cleaning up after themselves. Plus, if one toilet is unavailable in a communal bathroom, there are still two or three other toilets to use. The same goes for the shower stalls. By the way, the only time I had to wait to take a shower was during orientation week, when almost everyone had the same schedule.

With that said, I’ll make two closing statments: (1) If you’re an AMR resident, please clean up after yourself! It’ll help make the communal bathroom situation livable. (2) Just as there are pros to private bathroom usage in Buildings A/B and Wolman, there are pros to communal bathroom usage in the AMRs. Just as there are cons to communal bathroom usage in the AMRs, there are cons to private bathroom usage in Buildings A/B and Wolman.