A new trend has swept campus: urinating in bottles. The most common culprits are freshmen males.

On Jan. 31, Chelsea Rodriguez ’10, a Residential Advisor in Fauver Residence Hall, sent out an e-mail to all residents. The subject line read: “Urine is for the Toilet Bowl—PLEASE READ.”
“It has come to our attention that some individuals have been urinating in an excessive number of bottles and moving them to the trash room to be disposed of by the Fauver custodial staff,” Rodriguez wrote. “This is completely unacceptable and must not continue.”
The e-mail went on to call the practice a “health hazard…[and] unfair to the lovely ladies brave enough to work in Fauver.”

Rodriguez offered a simple solution.

“Every floor is equipped with lovely bathrooms ready and willing to dispose of that pesky urine for you,” she wrote.

But the e-mail may not have had its intended effect, according to one male freshman Fauver resident, who agreed to discuss his urinary habits on the condition of anonymity.

“I didn’t know people pissed in bottles until I read that e-mail,” he said. “I don’t know who it was referring to, and then I woke up one day and I was like, ‘Ah shit, I really need to pee and I don’t feel like going anywhere.’ So I started pissing in bottles after the e-mail. I was like, ‘that’s such a good idea.’”

Having a roommate is part of the freshman experience. In the case of bottle urination, freshmen must live with their roommates’ habits.

“Yeah, he’s definitely a bottle pisser,” said the Fauver freshman’s roommate. “I don’t mind, as long as he doesn’t put it near my stuff. Excess pissing in bottles is lazy though.”
Other freshmen are less content with their roommate’s unusual method of urinating.
“I live in a divided double,” said another freshman male who does not live in Fauver. “I went into my roommate’s room looking for something and I noticed many bottles full of a strange colored liquid. On closer examination it turned out they were full of urine. My friend unscrewed and smelled one and it was definitely urine.”
He then faced an interesting dilemma: confront or ignore.

“My roommate almost definitely does not know that I know,” he said. “I did not consider confronting him. It’s a little distressing actually, partially because I don’t understand why he’s doing it, and partially because of the sheer volume of urine that is in there. There are a lot of bottles. Many, many small bottles. One time I saw a medium-sized tote bag full of full bottles of urine. It was so deliberate, it’s not like they were just sitting there. Someone was thinking a lot about them. The problem I have with it mostly is the keeping of them.”
So far, it appears that efforts to eradicate bottle urination have only fed the fire.
“Yo, one time I filled up a two liter of Pepsi all in one night,” said the Fauver freshman with pride. “I woke up like four times.”