When Doody Calls: What's Your Bathroom Behavior at Work?

What's Your Bathroom Behavior at Work?
What's Your Bathroom Behavior at Work?

by Jill Provost

There's dealing with crap at work, and then there's dealing with crap at work. One has to do with a load of asinine assignments and the other has to do with a load of, well, another sort. Today, we want to talk about the latter. In case you're not so good at reading between the lines, yes, we are in fact talking about pooping at work. You can thank the editors at TheFrisky for that -- they're the ones who brought it up in the first place.

It is a good question: What do you do when doody calls? Do you? Don't you? And if you don't, how in the heck do you control that sort of thing?

Some people (we'll guess men, mostly) relish this daily endeavor. We even know one person (a man, of course), Rage Against the Meshugenah author Danny Evans, who turned his output into works of art that he liked to show off to his coworkers. For unrelated reasons (we think), he no longer works for the company.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are mortified by the thought of going number two in the workplace loo. Even though we might consider this normal discretionary behavior, there is, of course, a condition for it. It's called parcopresis, and, as far as we know, there is no prescription medication to treat it -- yet. If there were, its side effects would probably include those run-of-the-mill symptoms like excessive gambling and eating in your sleep. There are even those who can't pee in a public bathroom. This condition is called paruresis, otherwise known as a bashful bladder.

I consider myself in the somewhat bashful bowels camp. I wouldn't say they have full-on social anxiety, but my intestines are more introverted than extroverted -- if I can save those private moments for the comfort of my own home, they're the happier for it. Being as I work from home now, clearly I don't have to exercise mind over, ahem, fecal matter. And, honestly, I'm not sure I could if I wanted to. Let's just say I was unfortunate enough to contract a nasty case of salmonella while in college and there was just no hiding it from professors or classmates. Luckily, when not infected with a food-borne illness, I am a regular kind of girl who has a small window of opportunity every morning just after her coffee and cereal. Aren't you glad you asked? Oh, wait, you didn't. Sorry about that. Well, we're asking: What do you do when you have to do number 2 at work?

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