I wouldn’t exactly say I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I do like routine. I like to get to work at roughly the same time (give or take a couple of minutes) every day, and leave at the same time. I listen to the same radio station in the car, write with the same pen at work, and I like to have my breakfast, dinner, and tea at the same time, every day. One of the side-effects of this is that my – ahem – scatological requirements are also pretty regular. That’s pretty regular. Not dead-on-the-same-time regular. Which is why I find it highly suspicious that the cleaners just happen to want to clean our office restrooms every time I happen to be in there.
Really. I’m not being paranoid. It’s every time. Without fail. No sooner do my cheeks meet the seat than there’s a knock on the door and someone is asking if they can come in and clean. At least I think that’s what she’s asking – it’s all in Spanish and my Spanish is limited to what I’ve picked up from Dora the Explorer which doesn’t cover such niceties – she could be asking if I wanted to take advantage of the complimentary arse-wiping service, for all I know… Anyway, it happens with such alarming regularity that I am beginning to think that it can’t be mere coincidence. The cleaner’s little cupboard (where she seems to spend all of the time she’s not hammering on the toilet door) is right next to the restroom, so she’s either drilled little ‘glory holes’ into the wall so she can see when I walk in, or she’s sat there with her ear pressed to the wall waiting for the sound of my pants hitting the floor, just so she can run round and interrupt me vacating my bowels, for her own sick amusement.
I would just sit securely in my cubicle and let her clean the remainder of the restroom, but there’s about a couple of inches gap between the door and the cubicle walls, and I’m not really one for eye contact when I’m dropping the kids off at the pool. I don’t know why they’re like that here in the U.S., whereas in Belgium (where it’s not unusual in bars for the ladies’ to be through the gents so they all get a good look at you standing at the urinal as they traipse through) the cubicle doors in the office restrooms were full floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall ones. Here, it’s like my old (boarding) school, where the doors only went halfway up. Although that was probably so the teachers could stroll past and see if they needed to get the canteen staff to add more bromide to the tea…
Actually, it could all be a part of some new company policy to make sure the staff don’t waste too much time on the toilet. They’re all about efficiency and productivity here, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve now started to look into cutting back on ‘toilet-time’. I guess the cleaner is a fairly cost-effective measure: pay someone on minimum wage to go round and rattle the toilet doors two minutes after your highly-paid staff have gone in, and jolly them along a bit. In some cases, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. I worked with a guy once who seemed to have some kind of narcolepsy. After one too many cases of him falling asleep whilst someone was talking to him (really) he started napping in the toilets during the day. You’d walk into the restrooms and there’d be this loud snoring coming from one of the cubicles. I’d have to go in and kick the door before our team meetings, just to wake him up.
But if it is an efficiency measure, why bother with the cleaner? Why not just automate the process? They could fit the cubicles with time-release doors like you get on those public toilets in London, where the door opens automatically after a certain amount of time, to stop the down-and-outs from using them as Japanese-style capsule hotels. And as an added incentive, they could mount a camera to the wall opposite the cubicle – after five minutes, the door springs open, and your photo is taken and instantly posted to the company Intranet in a kind of ‘name and shame’ policy. That’d stop people sitting in there reading the newspaper for half an hour.
Alright, maybe that’s a step too far (I hope…). But in a workplace where they have already limited the number of sick days you can take a year, I don’t think it is a huge leap to where they limit the amount of time you can spend on ‘non-company business’ during the working day. And it would be pretty easy to implement, too. In this office block, we have to badge in to and out of the building, so our employer knows how much time we have spent in the office. Why not fit the same badge locks onto the toilets, and then you can control how much time your employees are spending in the can. Set a limit of maybe 15 minutes a day, and if they go over that limit, the door won’t open when they try to badge in. Simple and effective. As an added bonus, coffee consumption would go down, providing cost savings there as well. Either that or the sale of Depends would go up… (Actually, I think they are standard attire in some telesales centers. At least the callers always sound to me as if they’re in a small amount of discomfort.)
The alternative to all of this is to make sure that staff are still productive even when they are parked on the porcelain. Some of the staff here have wireless handsfree telephone headsets, so they can walk away from their desk (to the fax machine, the fileroom, and so on) whilst they’re still on the phone. The other day I saw one of them coming out of the restrooms with their headset on, mid-conversation. So they must have been on the phone during their ‘comfort break’ (as the Americans like to euphemistically call it – although “taking a bio” [as in a ‘biologically necessitated break’] seems to be the new one). That must have been a pleasant call: “I’m giving your request my utmost consideration…(grunt)…I’m sending the report to you right now…(plop)…It should be with you shortly. Have a nice day!”.
Or maybe they could just extend the ‘hot-desking’ concept to the restrooms. Fit a docking station to the back of the door, and everyone can take their laptops with them, and not waste a second. Or just give us the wireless network I’ve been asking for for the past several years. If it meant that I could move the mail without the sphincter-tightening suspense of anticipating the rap of some aged scraggit’s bony knuckles on the door at any moment, I’d vote for it…
Leave a Reply