Bathroom hijinks have constituted the slapstick humor of many sitcoms and “garbage” comedies. Someone breaks a bathroom faucet, a toilet explodes, or someone forgets to lock the door during their visit to their dean’s home. The main character tries to explain, trips over the pants around their ankles, and face-plants. It’s not a joke that we want to take part in, but at some point in our lives we face the horrible realization that while dashing between classes or texting a friend back, we forgot to check upon entering the stall to see if it was equipped to meet our “needs.”

No one wants to debate between checking to see if that one session of yoga has paid off enough to bend your arm into the next stall over, and listening to your friend give their rendition of your plight for an entire month after you call them for help.

With thousands of students on campus we can’t take for granted that we will even find a stall without waiting in line, let alone a stocked one, and even if you do, you could find yourself in one such humiliating situation.

I took on the less than glamourous role of toilet investigator, and went to see for myself. Taking a friend would have made more sense, as standing in a stall waiting for the rest of the stalls to clear out seems much odder when it’s just you. I’m sure I had a lot of people wondering why I hadn’t picked one or left yet. This is even worse when most classmates, if not rushing to catch their next lecture, travel in bathroom flocks. I’ve grown up using a girl buddy system.

Avoiding eye contact and pretending I just really had to answer this text message on my phone, I gave many bathrooms a checklist once over. Visiting 11 buildings and over 118 stalls, I got to see some of the buildings (and bathrooms) I’ve never seen before.

While I discovered that Dobo Hall had the warmest bathrooms around, and that DeLoach Hall won for smallest, darkest, and overall creepiest bathrooms, I also found that most bathrooms were well stocked. At no point did any stall have all toilet paper rolls out, and most bathrooms, like Bear Hall, even kept emergency rolls hanging off the back of the toilet – just in case.

With each stall having two rolls of paper each, only 19 rolls were empty, making for an overall 8 percent. I decided to check for other things as well, and found that 17 of 34 soap containers were empty. Considering it’s flu season, I can take that to mean that most people are washing their hands regularly enough to use them up quickly. It is a bit concerning when 32% are empty, but at no point did I find any bathroom without at least some hand soap in reach. When it came to paper towels, I only found that two out of 45 dispensers were completely empty.

When you consider how many students are on campus, and how many of us forget the very basic needs that can make a huge impact on our day, I clap my hands in respect for the janitors that are keeping up with the high demand of every student on campus, keeping our school stocked, clean, and running smoothly. True, they might not be holding your grade in balance like a professor, but they still play an important part in making sure you don’t find yourself needing to wipe your hands on your jeans to dry them off, or making that embarrassing phone call to a friend for a few double ply sheets.