I have a pet peeve bordering on phobic that I typically don’t discuss with people. It’s a subject that is disgusting and disturbing and left out of polite conversation and most good writing for a reason. The subject of my phobia is my work bathroom. Or, I should say, my work bathrooms, as this has been a recurrent problem at all of my jobs. “Aha,” you think, “typical germaphobe.” Not quite. I will admit to opening the bathroom door with my just used paper towel but, in general, my problem is not with my fellow bathroom patrons’ hygiene. Rather it’s the audacious way that some of my coworkers behave while they are doing their personal bathroom deeds that sticks with me long after the bacteria from the soap dispenser has been re-deposited on my keyboard.  

Everybody poops and farts, passes gas, whatnot. I get it. There’s a book about it. It’s natural. However, I like to think that most people are more inhibited about their toilet activities in a public place. In fact, I know some people who are too embarrassed to even relieve certain needs in public toilets. Certainly there are circumstances that you simply can’t hold back in public restrooms, even if you want to. In such cases, I feel like there is an unspoken yet generally agreed upon decorum. Most people attempt a degree of modesty (and yes I checked with a few family members and friends to make sure that I wasn’t some sort of bathroom prude). If at all possible an empty bathroom is optimal but otherwise most people, if they can, wait for a flushing toilet or running sink to mask the telltale sounds of a number two. If immediate relief is necessary, most of us do our damndest to minimize the noises we make to a few prim plops or a whistle of wayward gas. But then there are those individuals who take no pains at all to hide the full-on sensory experience that is their poop.

I work with few such people who seem to have a complete disregard for the unwritten code of bathroom etiquette. I’m trapped at work for 8+ hours a day and my coworkers have become my daytime roommates. If you are my colleague, I’m familiar with you and your habits in a strangely personal way. I know your wardrobe rotations, or if you drank too much the night before, if you’re going through a divorce and, most intimately, your bathroom schedule. I can’t help it. I see your shoes peeking out from under the stall, those ones you wear with your every pair of black office-casual work pants. The anonymity that is associated with public bathrooms is lost in a workplace because even though they are “public,” the public is pretty limited. So now, not only do I know that you’ll be leaving early today because it’s Tuesday and you’ve got your chiropractor appointment, I also know that you’ve got a raging case of Irritable Bowel. 

You can’t help it. I know. You didn’t ask for indigestion or lactose intolerance. I feel you. It’s rough that you can’t eat the cheesecake they’re serving for our monthly office birthday celebration. But that’s the problem. You can eat the cheesecake; that’s the beauty of free will. You shouldn’t eat it. I know it, you know it, your doctor knows it. But you do. I watch you take “just a tiny piece” and it pisses me off because we both know what the consequences are for that tiny gut bomb. I can already hear your stomach gurgling after only two bites and if I could, I would slap that plate right out of your hand. You take each bite with insufferably smug satisfaction over your tasty little treat. But in about 15 minutes here that bathroom, that we both have to use (me about every half hour because, as you know, I love to drink tea and have a nervous bladder), is going to be a hazmat swamp and it’s going to be all your fault. I’m going to have to hold my breath or not breathe through my nose so that I can even stand to go in there. 

It further enrages me the next day when I see you noshing on a cheeseburger with a mound of greasy french-fries for lunch. Because then I have to listen to the moist spluttering as you basically pee out of your butt. Or the next day when all you eat is the leftover pizza from your dinner the night before and I have to endure a chorus of agonizing, constipated grunts because you haven’t eaten a vegetable in a month. You can’t eat an apple once in a while? Nope, it’s all cheese, cheese, cheese with you. Your forbidden temptress. That shit (literally) makes me hate you a little. I could understand if it were a once-in-a-while occurrence, we’ve all been there. But it happens multiple times a week. I can’t help but judge you and your eating habits. I watch as you mow down an excess of all the things that give your gut grief: the meat, the dairy, the caffeine and refined sugars. I know that it just turns into an angry mob of hot, pungent smells in your intestines. I resent that you refuse to be more respectful of your digestive limitations and my gag reflex. 

You’ve completely violated my faith that people will be inhibited about their private bathroom activities in a not-so-private stall; that they will do everything in their power to spare others the unpleasantness. On the contrary, you don’t seem to be the least bit uncomfortable about the nauseatingly “natural” noises and smells you are creating with your unhealthy poos. You don’t hold it in until people clear out or find an unoccupied bathroom. You have a complete lack of regard for my auditory and olfactory senses. You seem to think that four foot stall walls somehow shield the rest of us from the assault of your daily explosive diarrhea. You’re like the smoker who sits a foot away from me and blows smoke out of the side of your mouth to ostensibly send it in another direction. This is an act of “consideration” for me, even as I obviously sit bathed in your cloud of cancer.  

I’m offended that because you have a heightened comfort level at your work place, where you spend a third of your day, you think you can treat a communal area like it’s your own personal space to make as foul as your body deems necessary. My husband, who also works with a few chronic bathroom offenders, put it best when he said, “Just because it’s a bodily function doesn’t mean it can’t be polite.” If you really can’t hold it in and wait until you get home, I wish you would just use that bathroom in the basement, the one tucked back in a hallway that no one ever uses; the one that I have made numerous loud references to as the place where I go when I euphemistically “need a little extra privacy.” You don’t take the hint and instead I’m reduced to making the four-floor trek to the basement myself multiple times in the afternoon because I know the closer bathroom just isn’t safe after lunch.  

This problem has escalated in my mind which is why I finally felt compelled to write about the subject, objectionable though it may be. It’s not even close to the most dire of my problems—I was unemployed for nearly four months, I have family members with real health problems, my car is about to break down and I have no money to fix it because of the aforementioned unemployment and Sallie Mae’s monthly plunder of my finances— the bathroom issue at work still somehow takes up a lot of real estate in my mind. Amid all my more serious concerns, it’s for the afternoons that I harbor a disproportionate dread. The afternoons that are fraught with my coworkers’ antagonizing bowel movements.