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Or, how things get done and undone in a university, never inexpensively.

At some expense, last year, the university removed the door from the women’s bathroom immediately across the hallway from my office and slapped a “Handicap Accessible” sign above the door. This was their low-cost solution to an insufficiency of such facilities overall in the university. (They did the same for the men’s bathroom just a small way down the hall.)

An immediate uproar ensued amongst faculty and staff with offices on this floor. I contributed a few complaints, having my office literally six feet away from the now open doorway. The hall literally rang with the flushing of toilets (especially during class breaks) and offensive odors (thankfully, mostly perfume, but still!) sometime emanated. Those of us who’d prided ourselves on working with our doors open, to be accessible to students dropping in, abandoned that policy. And, sad to say, the bathrooms still weren’t especially accessible to differently-abled students since they’re right beside an automatic door to the centre stairwell and thus in a heavily trafficked and awkward part of the building. Not to mention that individuals who didn’t want to broadcast their toileting habits to the world stopped frequenting these bathrooms.

Today, two workers from physical plant came by and installed a new door at each bathroom. Immediately, faculty and staff poured out of our offices to praise them effusively. They were taken aback — usually no one comments much about their work. But, by golly, we love the fact that our hallways will no longer ring with the sound of flushing!

Right now, the doors appear very makeshift as they’re unpainted metal, liberally adorned with fingerprints and pawprints (it seems as if a Lab trotted all over the one across the hall from me!). The doors each have a small glass window so that people can see someone pushing from the other side, I presume hopefully avoid knocking down a disabled person. I expect the entire cost of this doors-off/doors-on exercise must be much more than it would have cost to install two automatic door-opening fixtures in the first place.

Soon, someone will be despatched to paint the unfinished doors at yet more cost. But at least my office will be that much more bearable, so I’m selfish enough to consider it a worthy expense, in the end, returning us, pretty much, to the status quo of a year gone by.