Handwashing, Oklahoma Sooner Fans Say Later

      The UFE (Urine Feces Everywhere) team visited the Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, Oklahoma, home of the Sooners, to watch them play the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. The University of Oklahoma is a perennial powerhouse and one of the finest traditions in all of college football. The campus and the surrounding town of Norman complete one of the finest backdrops that you could ever ask for in a college football setting; you could easily think that Norman is short for Norman Rockwell. The friendly fans quickly embrace you and are eager to share Sooner knowledge with any curious visitor.
      The UFE team and more than 86,000 supporting fans converged at the Oklahoma stadium in a game between these top ranked teams. It is interesting that in every detail of the Gaylord Family field, which you can see from national television, the camera’s perspective is top notch and picture perfect; but drop down into the bowels (not a pun) of the stadium and you will see something entirely different. In the restroom/concession area, you quickly learn why you will never mistake this stadium for a classic Rockwell. What you see is a stadium that looks like it has not been updated since Sam Walton’s wife, Helen, roamed its halls in the 1930’s. You can read all about the millions of dollars that went into the HD video replay board and the LED ribbon displays, but what you will not read is that the restrooms haven’t been updated since Calvin Coolidge was President.
The food concessions are fairly decent at the stadium. Most of the food is prepared off-site but the concession vendors cross contaminate food and money constantly, and hand washing sinks are very rare. The condiments stations are filthy and need to be avoided; the napkin dispensers appear to always be empty after halftime.
     The restrooms are something to see at the Oklahoma stadium; the UFE team was in shock at what they witnessed. We are not the Albert Einstein’s of the Architecture world, but if we had to guess we would say that the restrooms at the Gaylord Family stadium were designed by the same architect that designed the Wrigley Field restrooms (see Chicago Cubs @ ufe.com).
     You have to feel sorry for any male at the game that really needed to sit down in one of the stalls in the men’s room. They are constantly full with men standing up to urinate (with really bad aim)because they have a shy bladder(paruresis) and men discreetly hiding in the stalls, pouring their mini hard liquor bottles into concession soda pop glasses. These Sooner fans drink the quality liquor; the recession seems to have missed Norman, Oklahoma. In fact we hear that the men’s restroom stalls are a Maraschino cherry jar away from officially being considered a full service bar.
       The restrooms for the men have 5 sinks (no hot water), 22 3-men urinal troughs, and 6 stalls for a very poor pee to wash ratio of 72/5. Several sinks had out of order signs on them and one restroom had only one trough sink for a restroom that can accommodate 72 men. The waiting lines for the restrooms reached several hundred during peak times during the game. We are guessing that this quantity of restrooms was correct for the 1920’s when the field held 16,000 fans. As for the percentage of fans that are washing their hands in the busy times: 23% of the female fans failed to wash their hands after using the restroom. A whopping 94% of the men failed to stop by the sink after using the restroom, which is a new UFE record! Not to worry, did we show you our multimillion dollar HD screen?