Flushing the toilet while you're sitting on it is like betting it all on red; it can go either way...

Workplace bathroom behavior would make for an awesome case study. We spend 7+ hours at a place where we carefully maintain our social interactions, trying to optimize for very idiosyncratic professional goals, but one thing we all have in common: we all poop. And given the amount of coffee that gets consumed in highly competitive New York firms, I imagine this reality manifests itself quite frequently.

That being said, we don’t talk about it! I’m not trying to say that the topic should be the lunchtime conversation of choice, but merely noting that there’s this common behavior that functions independently of the communication feedback loop that influences so much of the rest of what we do!

So take this one: I go use the toilet; I’m the only one in the bathroom. As I finish and open the, what is now one of three, empty stalls; another man walks in. I proceed to wash my hands and he takes some paper towel and blows his nose; we are both looking into the mirror, silently. He hesitates at the mirror for about 20 seconds after he throws out his tissue, and the proceeds to walk into the stall I just walked out of. He knew I had just used the stall, so what was going through his mind? I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but I don’t like warm toilet seats, do you? I imagine not. Perhaps the fact that every stall has a bottle of Lysol disinfectant spray and toilet seat covers negates the, what I would expect to be normal, inhibition to use a just-used stall; perhaps this man was just weird; or perhaps this is a personal quirk of mine (I would use a different stall), and I’m the strange one. I guess we’ll never know…