Toilet Talk: A Q&A with UMd.'s Resident Bathroom Enthusiast Rich Abdill

Rich Abdill writes about bathrooms. Almost every day. He has an intern who receives class credit for doing bathroom-related research. We at Patch found this pretty amusing, and therefore caught up with Rich to discuss his blog, UMD Bathroom Inventory, which is dedicated exclusively to rating the quality of restrooms, toilets, and loos around the University of Maryland and someday, God willing, beyond.

Warning: The following narrative contains use of the word "bathroom" 37 times, the word "toilet" 5 times, and handful of varients of the word "poop." But, it also discusses Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten, so our hope is that it evens out.

College Park Patch: When did you start analyzing bathrooms?

Rich Abdill: I started the blog in April of this year after trying all of the standard journalistic nerd blogs. You know, I wanted to talk about news, and editorials, and articles I really liked, but nobody ever cared and I never got any hits. Then within a week of me starting this crap website – no pun really intended – we were getting 500 views a day. People would walk past me in the South Campus Dining Hall and be like "Hey, you're that toilet guy!" I don't know if that was cool or not…no, it was definitely cool.

Patch: Why bathrooms?

RA: Regardless of our differences, that's the one thing that unifies all of us. Everyone goes to the bathroom. Nobody wants a gross crapper to go in.

Patch: Does your expertise extend to bathrooms, or is it focused more on toilets?

RA: It's really the whole package. If a toilet is like, hanging off the wall or covered in mysterious substances, then yeah, that's going to hurt the grade. But it's the overall experience. One thing that definitely comes up, especially when we're talking about possible interview questions for people that we've got is that we don't really talk about using the bathroom, as much as like, the actual bathroom. We just actually today finished an interview with Olympic Gold Medalist Carli Lloyd, who scored the game winning goal in the women's soccer gold medal game in 2008. And we didn't talk about actually pooping at all, just because that's gross – nobody wants to talk about that. But it was more just like "What bathrooms do you enjoy? What do you look for in a bathroom?" And so I feel like people are a little more responsive to that.

Patch: You have interviewed Dave Barry and, more preposterously, Gene Weingarten.  How? Did they come to you?

RA: No. Nobody has ever, ever come to me. I was actually following Gene Weingarten on Twitter, and saw that his little avatar was literally a pile of crap. So I just tweeted at him and said "Would you mind a 10 minute interview about bathrooms?" And he direct-messaged me back and said yeah, let's do it. If we can do it all through Twitter, I'm in. So it ended up being like an hour and a half of just back and forth. It was really difficult. I mean, he answered everything I asked him. And Barry, I really hadn't thought about until I realized Gene Weingarten had been his editor. So I was like, "Oh hey, maybe I can name-drop Weingarten and get this Dave Barry guy." So I emailed his assistant and the subject was literally "Interview about Poop." It must have got her attention, because she emailed me and said "I don't know if he'll do this, he's out on a book tour." And I said "OK, that's fine, whatever." But she asked him about it, and he made her fax him the questions so he could answer them. I say fax, but I don't know if that's necessarily true. Somehow, he was out on the road somewhere, and he sent me the answers to the questions. And it was tough because I couldn't ask follow ups…but the goal is basically to interview people who are ridiculously overqualified in their field, about bathrooms. And Weingarten's won two Pulitzers, Barry's won a Pulitzer and written like 35 books…granted they're all kind of about pooping, but hey, they're still books.

Patch: There are a number of internet sensations who have landed book deals. When can we expect yours?

RA: I really don't know what I could do for a book. I'm by no means an authority on bathrooms at all. It's just a very humble website. You know, it's just a couple of guys going to bathrooms and saying "This one's good, this one isn't so good." I really like that it's about the University of Maryland. I don't know that I could write about something broader than that; I feel like we wouldn't be as good or as relevant. A book?! What would I write about?!

Patch: The one I'm thinking of is that blog, Stuff Hipsters Hate? They got a book deal. So…what do they write about?

RA: And then there was the one, Stuff White People Like, that was like the original.

My only thought would be where I could get enough money together to go on this cross-country Kerouac journey looking at the bathrooms of America and trying to find out where the American dream is, and which way the water spins around in the bowl wherever it is.

Patch: The purpose is that it's on campus. Have you explored off-campus bathrooms like along Route 1, or the greater Maryland area?

RA: Route 1 is definitely our next destination. There are so many places on campus that we haven't gotten to yet, and we want to focus on that. Bathrooms on Route 1, and especially bathrooms that are open late at night , I feel like would definitely be a good resource. We'd probably set the boundary at walking distance because if we say "Oh hey, that bathrooms down at Franklin's in Hyattsville are really good" it doesn't really matter because it's a car ride away. But Route 1 is definitely in our future.

For the record, some of the bathrooms there, we haven't actually been like walking in and been like "Hey I'm gonna use this bathroom now." Jake and I, more often than not, just end up splitting up and looking for bathrooms, and walk in, check out the toilet, see if it smells terrible, see how the lighting is and then we just leave. It's not that we've actually gone to the bathroom  in every bathroom on campus that we've reviewed so far, but that would definitely help the myth. You can just lie if you want to.

Patch: Noted.  Now, your staff is all-male. Do you have a female correspondent for women's bathrooms?

RA: That's come up before. Just to clarify, there are two people that right now are working with me. Jake is a good friend of mine, he works [at Bathroom Inventory], we review bathrooms. He does whatever he wants on there. And Trey Ames is our intern; he's actually getting class credit to work for us.  I'm sorry, I don't remember what the question was…

Patch: Me neither. Right! A female correspondent.

RA: Yes! Somebody did a class project on the Bathroom Inventory and asked me that question. And I basically just said that we don't have a women's correspondent because we believe in equality.  If women want the same jobs, salaries, and rights as men, they can use the same bathrooms. I don't know if that's necessarily true or okay to say in print. But the way we look at it right now, the women's bathrooms are probably in very similar shape to the guy's bathroom, just because they're right next to each other. They probably have the same amount of traffic and receive the same amount of janitorial attention. Also, it makes the filing system way more complicated and we're not smart enough to deal with it.

Patch: Do you plan integrating this into your future career?

RA: I don't see much of a future in bathrooms after college. But this has been an invaluable experience, just running a website that people actually go to, trying to figure out a marketing campaign and joining a blog network that people actually go to. I'm actually writing a post, because I've had people ask me "Why haven't you posted anything today. It's been two days. Where the hell are you?" It's been so interesting  just to know that on any given day, 500 people are reading what I'm writing, even if it is about bathrooms. I feel like, just being able to say that I did that, even if I have to say that I worked at a place called the Bathroom Inventory, is really valuable on my resume. I haven't been shy about it. I work on Capitol Hill right now, and I've told everybody that I work with "Yeah, I blog about bathrooms, you gotta problem with it?" And…they do. But that's okay.