“You actually shower in the gangbang bathroom? I walked in there and just noped the fuck out of there”.
There’s two bathrooms on the second floor of the dorms in Building 155, high traffic stops serving about 100 people on the floor. One of them has individual shower stalls and is in general a pretty nice bathroom. The floors are some sort of blue linoleum, and there’s gotta be about six sinks in it. This isn’t my bathroom.
There’s another, smaller one that is all one inch tiles and has a shared shower situation. It’s three showerheads, and some shitty curtains partitioning individual stalls–clearly an afterthought. All three showers share on drain in the middle partition. This, is jokingly called the gangbang bathroom. This is my bathroom.
“Is someone in the good one?” I yell over to the shower area. It took me about two weeks to figure it out. I always took the furthest showerhead from the curtain separating the gangbang shower area from the bathroom–makes sense right? I made peace with the fact that the shower aggressively fluctuates from scalding hot to ice cold. Sometimes every 10 seconds. It’s pretty much the worst fucking shower in existence.
I even stopped showering every day. Sometimes I would wait a few days. During our briefing when we first got on the ice we were told to try to shower every other day to conserve water…so here I am doing my part to conserve resources.
“So, how many days a week do y’all shower” I naively ask at the dinner table.
“Every day man…wait, are you not showering every day?”
“They said you should only shower every other day at the briefing”
“There’s lots of water. That’s bullshit. I MAKE the fucking water. You fuckin’ shower every day. Multiple times a day. We can get that shower going, pull that curtain back. have a good ol’ shower party[…]
“If you don’t shower every day for some sort of water conservation bullshit, Imma knock your ass out in the shower…and leave the bitch runnin’.
He was right, he did work in the water plant after all. I felt deceived by the National Science Foundation, and moreover the dread of having to go toe-to-toe with that shower made me shudder.
Clearly, I didn’t know shit. Then one day–if only to add insult to injury–that shower stall was taken. I had to use the one closest to the bathroom area–son of a bitch. I take my shower, it was a nice, warm, shower. Only near the end did I realize that this was ‘the good one’. A real, nice, consistent shower. Some things you only learn from experience. I was doing it all fucking wrong.
“You wait for that god damn shower” said one of my friends when I bemoaned being stuck with the shitty shower. Now, I know better. I discovered ‘the good one’. And so I vowed, I’ll wait for it. It’s just not fucking worth it. I don’t care how much of a rush I’m in. I’d rather go without a shower then deal with the Antarctic Water Torture they got going on at showerhead number three.
And from that, I learnt to enjoy a shower every day. Showering every day like a human isn’t so bad when the water temperature is consistent.
