Last Tuesday, I walked towards the girls’ locker room to get ready for Early Bird. However, when I passed the girls’ bathroom across from the cafeteria, I noticed a group of custodians from Building and Grounds working with a sign blocking the doorway. What I failed to notice was the lack of door in that doorway.

Throughout the first half of the day, I heard snippets of conversations about bathroom doors being removed and girls getting caught vaping in bathrooms but I dismissed them as typical high school gossip. It wasn’t until I got to lunchtime and had to go to the bathroom to wash my hands that I realized the sincerity of that gossip.

Although the bathroom door was missing, nothing seemed too amiss. This made me realize that bathrooms don’t need doors because doors serve no purpose when it comes to privacy and design.

Bathroom doors are supposed to give people in the bathroom privacy, but real privacy doesn’t exist in modern America anymore. The National Security Agency (NSA) has full access to your phone data and some other technology company can probably hack into your phone camera at any time of the day. Bathroom doors are just another superficial facade of privacy that doesn’t exist in our world today. It’s yet another government scam. 

Not only do bathrooms give you a false sense of privacy, but they are also hazardous to ordinary people. The germs on a bathroom door could have the power to kill someone. And, if a door swings too wide open with too much power, it could do some serious damage on somebody. Doors also restrict the airflow in the bathrooms. Some may feel suffocated in the bathroom and begin to suffer serious emotional trauma because of the lack of fresh air. 

Lacking bathroom doors seems to be a new architectural design as well. If you look at some sites, there are a lot of bathrooms that have either no bathroom doors or glass bathroom doors that essentially serve no purpose. Clearly, having no bathroom doors is a millennial trend that our school is trying to adopt. The administration is simply trying to spice up the school’s boring design, which no one will blame them for since Central looks like a boxed prison from the outside. Who needs a referendum when we can have trendy bathrooms?

So don’t stress about the lack of bathroom doors. Sure, someone might catch you picking a piece of lettuce out of your teeth in front of the bathroom mirror or enjoying the one peaceful moment of privacy you have in the day, but remember that bathroom doors are not necessary at all.