Idiotic Vandalism: Bathroom Marketing

Normally in a bathroom stall, you’ll find sad attempts at art, proclamations of love and other scribbles. You often find yourself wondering, don’t these people have better things to do than sit in the bathroom and draw or write random quotes on the walls? Do you know anyone who packs a sharpie with them on the way to the powder room just in case inspiration strikes them? I don’t.

I just saw this in the bathroom at Espresso Royale at BU. I suppose I could point out that societally this marks a shift from phones to blogs as the primary mode of bathroom to outside world discourse (think “for a good time call”). Where before we saw bathroom vandalism as a likely form of harassment, now we find shameless self-promotion. As if the movement towards straight advertisements in the bathroom wasn’t enough evidence of a society over saturated--now even the scribbles in the corner are trying to sell us something.

However, what’s truly idiotic about this attempt at vandalism is the fact that it’s so easy to track back to its creator. When you quote Shakespeare or rock lyrics, or when you write someone else’s number on the wall, maybe someone could speculate, but no one would ever know for sure who it was. Unless you’ve got a truly avid fan—which I highly doubt either of these two bloggers has—it’s pretty clear who vandalized the bathroom.

Then again, it’s ERC. Who would report it?