Sometime during the summer, the university installed so-called waterless urinals. I’ve read up on these things, and in theory, waterless urinals seem a really good choice. Here’s a quote from something I found in the vast plains of the Interweb:

[...] there appear to be three primary advantages of the waterless urinal: water savings; reduced maintenance; and improved hygiene.

Now, I’m all for water savings, reduced maintenance and improved hygiene. Too bad it doesn’t work that way. Ever since these things have been introduced, the restrooms smell even worse than they did before. Which leaves us in a bad place, considering that they smelled like a wet, dead cat before. So what went wrong? According to manufacturers, bacteria need moist environments to do their thing, and since these urinals always dry out, there’s no place for them to sit. Ergo, no smell. Well, there is smell, and my educated guess is, that someone at the administration level at the university thought that waterless urinals are the best, because you don’t need any water, and since you don’t need any water you can actually totally forget about them and don’t have to make maintenance people go in there and fix them if they don’t actually do what they were promised to do, which is NOT SMELL LIKE DEATH!

It’s not surprising that just above the urinals, someone scribbled this Shiningesque message of despair. Murder indeed.