🙊🙉🙊 Can We Talk For A Moment About...Work Poop Anxiety? 💩

When I worked corporate, my best guy friend — whom I’ll call Justin Bieber to protect his anonymity — had some candid conversations with me. People just tell me stuff. I don’t actively solicit it, but I do tend to draw stories out of people without trying. My friends since 7th grade call me The White Oprah.

So…the Biebs and I eventually got comfortable enough with each other to chat openly about deeply personal stuff. It devolved to the point that we began sharing our strategies for where and when we could poop in our corporate office building to level up on privacy. (If only someone invented a public restroom vacancy app…)

We agreed on this point: 🐒being walked in on, mid-monkey tail, was sub-optimal. It’s like a game of freeze.

• You hold your breath.

• You prairie-dog it.

• You flush to mask any sound effects.

• You shuffle the toilet paper in your hands, praying they’ll take the hint and hurry their asses on outta there. (They never do. “Could you wash your hands and check your makeup any more slowly?” )

• You sweat bullets like a hyperhidrosis patient.

• 🙏🏻You pray “Please God, don’t let them recognize my shoes…”

🚽As I confessed to the Biebs, my ass has EYEBALLS. 👀 It knows when I’m not sitting on my throne at home.

MY. ASS. GETS. STAGE FRIGHT.

Then the Biebs confided in me. I learned which guys pooped after lunch…and where. I also learned that one of our taller executives would look down at the much-shorter Biebs, chatting away as they stood next to each other urinating. This made the Biebs wildly uncomfortable.

Boy…you think you know people…

Justin Bieber and I both would pace impatiently in the bathroom hallways, our poops nearly touching cloth, pretending to chat on our iPhones as we surveilled for bathrooms to empty…like our gurgling bowels desperately wanted to. We’d both ridden up and down the seven floors in our elevator, scoping out the floors with the emptiest bathrooms. We reached the same conclusion: the lobby floor bathroom was oddly the safest.

One early morning, I was stepping into the elevator to start my day as one of my co-workers hurriedly exited the elevator, racing past me toward the lobby bathroom. I attempted a friendly “hello,” but this guy didn’t hear me. He was a man on a mission. The dead giveaway? His rancid crop-dusting, which I had to hold my breath not to inhale during my entire ascension to the 5th floor in this now-empty elevator. He, too, had discovered the lobby privy’s porcelain privacy.

One day at lunch, because gross topics never kill my appetite (there’s nothing funnier than breaking bread with plumbers or morticians for crazy, gross stories), I was telling Justin Bieber how our company’s new corporate sustainability initiative — no more bottled waters — was in direct conflict with our visiting overseas executive team’s preferred bathroom hygiene protocol: they placed bottled waters on the floor behind each toilet in the men’s room. These guys were driving our self-appointed sustainability policewoman, a.k.a. our company’s building manager, crazy. According to her, they fashioned some sort of D-I-Y’ed bidet situation with these bottled waters next to their toilets. I sought no mental picture, but my building manager enjoyed expounding on icky topics.

Who was I not to listen?

I began polling my friends and family about this pooping-at-work issue. I realized the Biebs and I were not alone. The one blessing of the Covid-19 lockdown was being able to finally poop at home. Thank God for the “mute” button on the iPhone. Every single person I polled hated pooping at work.

Someone needs to do a legit time management study. The C-Suite would be astounded — dare I say ass-tounded? — by the amount of time wasted by workers like me with shy anuses seeking empty bathrooms.

I once watched the AMC horror series THE TERROR about this team of British sailor-explorers seeking the fabled “Northwest Passage” to cut through the Arctic for a faster shipping route. The captain of the ship called the cushioned hole he sat on to defecate directly into the angry sea his “comfort seat.”

The Japanese seem to have doubled down on this term, taking this whole comfort seat concept to the extreme. And I applaud them.

I’m told that Japanese restrooms offer this fantasy bathroom situation — a scent-proof, sound-proof toileting experience, cloaking any evidence of the human filth that goes on behind closed stall doors. The closest I’ve been to a Japanese restroom was a visit to my local Benihana, so you may want to fact-check me on this.

Here’s what I heard:

🧻 Imagine this….you step in.

🧻 You drop trou (rhymes with brow).

🧻 And the moment your butt meets the seat, a musical soundscape drowns out the flatter notes from your ass trumpet.

🧻 The automated scent of cherry blossoms — or whichever scent you choose, but the sh*t scent would be a silly choice — hits the air, masking your own toot toxins.

🧻 Then a samurai sword swings down from the ceiling to cut your turds. (Okay, that last part is an exaggeration.)

As if this magical experience isn’t mind-blowingly enough, there’s this whole insane bidet system that looks like a NASA control panel.

🧻 There’s temperature-controlled, soapy water.

🧻 And once your ass has been shampooed (to un-poo you), there’s a temperature-controlled ass crack dryer on these magical comfort seats.

🧻 Then, a gong sounds off to indicate you are done. (This last point? Also fake.)

So I present to all public restroom designers this, my modest proposal, for making everyone’s life easier:

Public restrooms and corporations everywhere should install these Japanese-style toileting systems. Pronto. (For the techno-tarded like me, simplified graphics need to accompany that NASA control panel.) I guarantee that within six months, all companies would save millions in worker productivity. I would place Las Vegas bets on companies meeting less resistance with getting employees to return to their dreary, er, fabulous cubicle farms.

Corporations, is it too much to ask for you to do this one simple task?

Prioritize your workers’ work poops.

But, until the corporate world catches up with the rest of us, there’s always my ADHD subterfuge solution: the old “Bathroom Out of Order Until Further Notice” sign.

🎯PRO TIPS: Make sure you print this sign on your company’s stationery. It adds credibility. Be sure to switch floors each time so no one detects a pattern in the time of day the bathroom seems to go awry.