Stealth Showering!

In museums, and in public buildings, and all sorts of places, there are doors beyond which the lowly public is not permitted to pass. There are signs on them saying, “Private,” and “No Entry,” and “Staff Only,” and “Warning, Biohazard.” Oftentimes there are employees, or armed guards, to make sure the instructions or implications on these signs are followed. But then there are the places in which no one thinks anybody would try to get—buildings not specifically open to the public, but not locked or forbidden, either, containing rooms that no one thinks to guard because it’s not thought that unwelcome visitors would come that way. These rooms do not usually contain sensitive information, or anything private—no harm comes of looking around in them. I always enjoy looking in those rooms no one thinks to guard, stepping beyond shut but unlocked doors for a peep around. The Board of Trustees Room in the administration building of my university is one of my favourite haunts.
Here at the college in Oxford, there are also a great many doors, most of them locked but some of them not. I’ve poked around in some of them, looked at the furnishings or the twisting passageways, and left them as I found them.
I shall now digress to a seemingly unrelated subject.
The plumbing in a seven-hundred-year-old building is not exactly on par with American standards. And when a bathroom is shoved into a little left-over corner of a hallway, plumbing jammed in whatever space is available, with the appropriate fixtures sometimes shrunk to fit, standards of cleanliness are apparently also relaxed. The bathroom in my stairwell is a tiny shaft of a room, shivering cold even in summer, full of shampoo bottles left behind by past students, and has a couple pairs of shoes sitting in the entryway. It apparently is used by the rowing team during term. All this could be forgiven, however, if the shower were capable of producing hot water, which has always been, in my mind, one of the great benefits of plumbing. However, it cannot, so I do not use this bathroom. I attempted once to sponge bathe in the less primitive sink in my bedroom, but this was an unsuccessful, messy attempt.
The second shower I tried is in a private bathroom attached to my friend’s bedroom. For many mornings, I’ve gotten her out of bed around seven o’clock to let me into her room so I can invade her bathroom for a half an hour. And they haven’t even got the plumbing perfect in there, though it has achieved the all-important hot water. But the room is tiled, and the shower consists of a spigot stuck in the wall. Whenever one turns it on, the entire room is sprayed with liquid, leaving fine mists in some places, and puddles in others. The floor isn’t exactly angled towards the small drain installed in it.
I tried a third shower, in hopes of at least being able to spread out my invasive personal hygiene. The third shower was in the stairwell beside mine. It is reached by means of an oddly-angled passage, and is also a small, shaft-like, chilly room, this one short a sink. There was hot water, which covers a multitude of sins, such as the muddy prints on the floor of the shower. But it seems that one of the myriad construction projects required in a seven-hundred year old building for maintenance and modernization had been begun at one point in this bathroom, and then abandoned. Shards of plaster littered the floor, a strip of tiling along the threshold of the shower had been removed, revealing filthy, icy floor beneath, and a chunk of the wall lay there, revealing a deep, dark hole through which the outline of pipes and shadows of God knows what could be seen. I was not keen to return, so I fled back to the safety of my friend’s bathroom.
Then, quite by accident, I discovered a triumph of modern plumbing over ancient architecture.
While showing some fellow students one of the odd sights that’s to be seen all over the college—in this case a gold-painted toilet perched inexplicably at the top of a staircase—I passed a door which is normally closed, and which I have not tried to enter. Today, a sign was stuck to the door saying, “Luggage Room” (groups staying at the college periodically reserve ground-floor rooms for their members to store suitcases in, instead of forcing them to drag their heavy baggage up multiple flights of stairs) and it was standing open. I could see straight back to the entrance to a bathroom, so I poked my head in. The luggage room appeared to be a clean, nicely-furnished bedroom, laid out as if for a guest. The attached bathroom, much larger than any bathroom I’ve seen in the college thus far, was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
It had a fully-tiled floor, a regular-sized sink, and a toilet painted a tasteful white. And it had a shower stall. Clean. Empty of shoes and shampoo bottles. Simply sitting there, waiting to be used.
The next day, in the early hours before breakfast, I packed up my shower supplies and walked briskly across the college. I worried that the door would be locked. That there would be people in the room. That staff members would be hovering threateningly around it. But none of this was the case. The door still stood open, the room beyond was still empty, tidy, and waiting. The bathroom was not a dream, but a joyful reality. I hurried inside and shut the bathroom door, slightly dismayed to discover it didn’t have a lock. Nevertheless, I resolutely carried out my showering ritual, keeping a nervous eye on the bathroom door through the glass panel of the shower stall. But I was victorious, and left the bathroom in the same state I had found it, except that I left the shower stall door open so that it could dry out.
I left feeling exhilarated. This was a step beyond simply looking around in a room nobody thought would interest passers-by. Still, I had done no harm—the bathroom was still clean, the room was still tidy. This was better than turning cartwheels in the Board of Trustees Room, or exploring a half-constructed, unguarded house. I’ve managed to combine a sense of daring and excitement with personal hygiene, though I really don’t think anyone particularly cares. Still, I enjoy it, and plan to continue to use the shower as long as the door remains unlocked.