In search of a Toilet at the new Minneapolis Central Library

by Leigh Pomeroy

The esteemed fellows of the Minnesota outpost of the New Journalists program of the Center for Independent Media were being called together for one of their infrequent face-to-face gatherings. This was done partially as a training session and partially as a way for them to remind themselves that they were not simply disembodied presences on the Internet but real flesh-and-blood Homo Sapiens — well, at least most of them, anyway.

The meeting was to take place at the new downtown Minneapolis Central Library, a repository of information in many formats, including those anachronistic things we call books, for which libraries are duly noted. Today's libraries, of course, are much more than book repositories and lenders, as they deal in all forms of physical media, plus provide access to quadrillions of bits of information residing on computers located around the world.

Actually, it's really cool if you think about it. The amount of information we have available to us on a nearly instantaneous basis far outstrips our ability to absorb it. Yet that also leads to a disconnect for precisely the same reason: While the information available to us infinite, our physiological ability to absorb it is finite.

Today it's nothing for a pet owner to have an identity chip installed in Fido or Fluffy just in case the little critter gets lost. ID tags on collars can be lost or stolen, but implanted identity chips are not particularly easy to dig out, which is why pet owners favor them.

Soon, of course, we Homo Sapiens are going to have similar chips embedded in ourselves. Though there will be some rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth over the issue, the conflict will go away within a relatively short period of time — probably a decade or two — and having a chip embedded will be no more strange than circumcisions for men or boob jobs for women.

Meanwhile, it won't be long before we figure out how to connect the human brain with external storage devices. This means that parents, along with all the other decisions they have to make, will have to decide whether they want RAM, a hard drive, a USB port or some future equivalent of all three embedded into their offspring. Human beings will then be able to store more info on board or plug in and access a network without going through the time-consuming and error-prone process that I'm doing now — i.e., reading and typing.

At any rate, the new downtown Minneapolis Central Library is meant to be a fundamental precursor of universal information access. The only problem is that it has jumped ahead of itself in certain ways.

Very possibly there will be a way in the future whereby we can download our — ahem — bodily wastes without going to the traditional crapper or urinal. But right now restrooms are still necessary and there appears to be no 100- or 200-year plan in place for the human species to deal with this necessary function of animal behavior in any other way.

That's why I don't understand how the designers of the new downtown Minneapolis Central Library couldn't have figured out that people who visit libraries, even if they're interfacing with an AIM pal in Outer Mongolia or logging onto a U.S. Government database, still have to use the toidy.

I had driven almost two hours to get to my meeting at the library and before going in wanted to, uh, go #2. So I decided to look for a restroom on the second floor of the library, the same floor on which my meeting was to take place. After trying to fathom the library's floor map on one of four information video screens near the elevator, I was able to ascertain from the hieroglyphics thereon — apparently, words are not permitted on video-screened maps — where the restrooms on the floor were located.

I found the men's restroom, but inasmuch as the business I needed to conduct required a stall, I was disappointed to find the one stall in that restroom was in use. Further, from noting the amount of clothes on the floor inside that stall, it appeared it was going to be in use for quite some time. So I went back to the video map and found another restroom on the floor, located across one of two causeways that spanned an open atrium. The door to one causeway was marked "Emergency exit only." The other was walkable, emptying into a labyrinthine room of book stacks. After wandering around there for a while I realized that there was no way to the restroom. For some reason, it was on the other side of a solid wall with no way through.

So I backtracked across the causeway and decided to head one floor up. I found the restroom on the third floor, but discovered that stall occupied as well. So I backtracked to the stairway and went up the fourth floor. It, too, was in use, and there was someone else waiting. So I went back down to the third — still occupied; and to the second, still being camped in — and finally down to the first, where I found a guard who allowed me to go out the "in" door — a major concession for the Minneapolis Central Library apparently — to a restroom that mercifully offered an empty, though not altogether clean stall where I could conduct my business.

Because of the size of the library, the location of the restrooms and the stairs and elevators being not really near each other, this whole process took me a good 20 minutes. In that amount of time I could have downloaded a good gigabyte or two of information.

So while the new Minneapolis Central Library has wonderful electronic gadgetry, including video-screened maps and fast Internet, it appears that the designers thereof had apparently forgotten that some things simply can't be done online or accessed via a keypad or touch pad. Maybe some day in the future they will — this reminds me of an old grammar school joke about how extraterrestrials have sex — but for now, well, #2 still requires in a civilized society a strictly mechanical device that in no way resembles a modem.