I've mentioned this before, but my high school and the teachers had
some pretty stupid and restrictive bathroom policies enforced with a
near Gestapo-like zeal. Asking to be excused during class was seen as
disrespectful, lazy, deliberately inconsiderate to the teacher, and
automatically assumed to have ulterior motives. It didn't seem like a
single teacher believed that students asking for a bathroom pass were
actually going to go to the bathroom--or at least, not solely. We
were also planning on making pipe bombs, staging orgies, shooting
heroin, and engaging in a lot of good old-fashioned vandalism. The only
time most people could use the bathroom during the day was at lunchtime
because it was the only time and place you didn't need a pass or
permission. The same teachers who thought a bathroom break was a sign of
juvenile delinquent behaviour would also do incredibly fucked up things
like mark you for an unexcused absence or unexcused tardy--or worse,
actually lock you out of the classroom and refuse to let you in--which,
if you had more than a handful of, could prevent you from graduating
and even get you suspended or expelled. This is not in any way an
exaggeration. It's entirely 100% fucking true.
So
urinary needs were a taboo at that school. Most of the time the teacher
would just flat-out refuse to let you go, but some of them were even
more sadistic. It wasn't uncommon, at the start of each new semester,
for certain teachers to give out pre-printed bathroom passes, usually
just two or three of them, that could be used in that class during the
semester. If you lost or used them and had to pee one day, you were
pretty well totally out of luck. You used all your passes, you can't go,
you gotta sit there until you pee your pants. Similarly, some would
write passes only in the school's agenda books that were handed out
every year, and again, if you didn't have it then you were shit outta
luck.
All of which is a big freaking problem if, like me,
you have a clockwork bladder that demands you relieve it at more or less
the same time every day. Teachers started getting suspicious at regular
requests for bathroom passes because they thought we were all going to
some pre-arranged regular meeting centred around illegal activities.
The
limited bathroom passes were the worst. Yeah, you could at least go pee
a couple of times over the semester, but it contributed to the school's
already ruthless black market.
Again, this is not an exaggeration; I think most schools have
something in the way of under-the-table or black markets where
contraband items--snacks, test answers, drugs, and other things we
weren't supposed to have--could be bought and sold. But because none of
them were available on school grounds, the people who had them basically
had monopolies and acted much like drug dealers. They raised prices,
bullied students, and preyed on our desperation for their own personal
gain. I'm sure most of the people responsible are either in a ditch on
fire, dead, or in jail by now. They were that kind of hardcore dealers.
It was like that.
Since there were over 2100 kids at the school (it's over 2500 now), almost no teacher could keep track of how many times an individual student used a bathroom pass so if you were so inclined, you could get more in secret from the black market. Sometimes the passes were photocopied or duplicated; other times they were bought from kids who didn't intend to use them and sold to the ones who needed them. For actual money. Sometimes drugs and sexual favours, as well.
There were a lot of things wrong at that school but the presence of a black market for fucking bathroom passes says a lot about the social climate, the culture, and the ludicrousness of some of the more arbitrary school rules.
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