I just moved to a new college. At my prior place, I might see one student in hours in an entire semester. Here, in hours there are usually two or three each session. So yes, it varies.
Yes. Not to overshare but I find that failure to actively dry changes the biome back there; in short it can get itchy. Just pulling up and heading off is not enough (use a small towel). That said though, it is great.
Possibly you are describing how it used to be before the input encoding standard for LaTeX switched to UTF-8?