It's staggering just how much school toilets have featured in the news of late. Readers of one of my recent reports learned of
locker room copro-chaos in California. Today I present you with two further events: bluster in the Bronx, and "You what?!" in Utah.
When I was at school, certain sadistic teachers seemed to take delight in denying pupils' requests to go to the bathroom. In one Bronx school, however, it seems that the teachers would have no problem with kids attending a call of nature during lessons; rather, it's the school administrators who are not too happy with it. They've mandated that only a mere fifteen-minute window of opportunity shall creak open each day for first- through third-graders. (login: pooppooppooppoop@yahoo.com password: poopreport)
Fifteen minutes? I mean, Christ! My stepson is in second grade and he pisses and craps more than our eight-month-old kitten does. If he were prevented from relieving himself, I would write a very strong letter to the school admin indeed.
This policy has put teachers at this school in a bit of a bind. According to the New York Post, "children have not been forbidden from using the bathroom outside their time slot. But teachers claim administrators have reprimanded them when they allow students to do so." The words of one teacher read like those of attorney trying to offer advice to his client: "I tell them to go at their own risk."
I wonder if some Stewie Griffin-like whippersnapper will end up planting a bomb in the toilet in protest? If they knew what happened in Orem, Utah, last week, they might get ideas. At the LDS Church Institute of Religion building at Utah Valley State College, two toilets were clogged: one with something that disappeared 'round the S-bend before it could be identified, and the other with what looked like "a battery with some wires, a small motor, and some cork," according to UVSC spokesman Derek Hall.
After over three hundred people were evacuated ("a good excuse to skip class," according to fire science student Eli Bowles), the bomb squad arrived to carry out a controlled explosion of the (thankfully) non-incendiary device. Half an hour after the device was dealt with, it was back to business for everyone.
It's fairly frequent, unfortunately, that we encounter turd terrorism in a bathroom -- but fortuitously rare that it's terrorism of the more Qaedaesque sort. According to Derek Hall, UVSC has received threats in the past. Was this device from someone else with a serious grudge? Or just someone who's watched that scene in Lethal Weapon 2 a few too many times? Whatever the motive of the prankster, I bet people at UVSC will now be checking their toilet bowls for multiple kinds of dirty bombs before dropping one of their own.