Bizarre stuff people do in office restrooms that they probably wouldn't do in their own bathrooms.

* Tile the floor THAT color.

It's not that I find reading in the bathroom weird, it's the leaving of the newspapers/magazines on the floor of the stall. It just seems sort've rudely presumptious (someone else can pick this up.) I dunno. It bugs me.

Same here! Isn't it weird? Weirder still, I've caught myself doing it once or twice. We are all mad.

Leave the fawcets running -- I'll never understand this one

I don't do this, but I think it might be another case of germ paranoia: ie., people afraid to touch the taps after they've just washed their hands and gotten them all immaculate. The level of fear of germs in this country is amusing.

I do this all the time at home. What's so odd about that?

* Leave the fawcets running -- I'll never understand this one.

yeah, that one's a mystery.

* Have stalls or urinals.

I have a urinal in my house!! The previous owner was a really "man's man" and I'm sure that installing his own urinal helped boost his manly self-image. It's little more than a conversation piece, though. I rarely use it and it's a pain in the ass to fix when it runs, which is often.

I do this all the time at home. What's so odd about that?

It's sloppy. And dangerous, kinda (you could slip on the newspaper if you're not looking and crack your cranium open on the porcelain throne). Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it just seems to say: "well, I'm done with this. I'll just leave it here for some lackey to clean up. I'm too important to stoop down and pick it up and carry in the punishing seven feet to the trash can".

Sometimes, my coworkers hum to themselves in the stall too. I guess this is because they're self-conscious.

Much like the girl on my floor who was taking jumbo craps and not flushing, I DON'T FUCKING GET IT.

ahahaha

it's weird to start hearing beep-beep-beep-boop-boop from the next stall. it's like their sphincter operates by keypad or somethin'.

Also loud-talkers who don't modulate when in small, hard-surfaced rooms.

And people who take enough paper towel (we have the continuous roll type) from the dispenser to make a mummy or two.

well, various minor toiletal idiosyncracies don't much bother me really -- as long as the floor ain't covered in a thick unevenly-mixed layer of excrement & urine.

I used to work at McDonald's and occasionally, at the end of a day, I would have to clean the washrooms. I learnt to fear these days for I knew there was a good chance I was going to see something so awful, so horrible that it would shake the very foundations of reality as I understood it. Disturbing scenes that I had not been exposed to since the last time I had to work that awful shift. Stalls that looked like amateur abortions were being performed by escaped mental patients. Hair and tampons stuck the mirrors like some kind of shrine to some obscure, twisted god. And after these demented individuals were through defiling the facilities it was up to me, tears streaming down my face, to clean these abominations. These were, of course, the women's washrooms.

The men's would usually have pee on the floor.

on the other hand the night i came down to the spa area to find a naked 60-something scots woman beckoning for me to join her in the tub may have coloured my memories.

Wasn't that a scene in The Shining?

Mind you, at least they don't feel the need to install blue fluorescent lighting in the stalls to prevent people shooting up in them, a situation I noted in a rather nice coffee shop on Oxford St yesterday.

Also yesterday, someone on my floor at work pissed all over the seat (presumably while hovering - because yes! your co-workers' recently-showered and quite fragrant arses are the most horrible things you'll ever avoid sloppy seconds from! unlike travelling on the tube, for example!) and then failed to flush. There aren't that many ladies working on this floor, and now I keep catching myself suspiciously glancing at everyone to gauge possible levels of neuroticism.

I'm always unsure about the etiquette of answering my phone whilst on the toilet. Do I try to pee quietly? Is it OK to answer the phone whilst you're still wiping? Or if you're still in the cubicle but about to leave?

(I should not have read Liz's post whilst trying to eat my lunch. It's right put me off.)

I don't think it's a terribly good idea to answer yr phone on the lav - unless you're going to wash it thoroughly along with your hands afterwards and don't mind people hearing you excrete, that is.

I used to do this. It was generally because I over slept so often. I had to keep the right change for coffee and a bagel and a toothbrush in my desk drawer, then I could make it to my desk on time and finish the morning routines I would have done at home whilst at work. We shared our floor with a radio station, and the progamming staff had to come in insanely early, so teeth cleaning employees were not massively unusual.

Anyway, before seing that, I was going to write 'sit on the sinks and chat', people seem to do this all the time in the places I work. If I sat on my sink at home it would break.

1. Gum flicked as high as possible onto the wall opposite the stall.
2. Loads and loads of toilet paper rammed into an unflushed pan, along with the traditional organic contents.
3. Newspapers left on the cistern folded back to page 3 of The Sun etc.
4. Sandwich wrappers left on the floor. As discussed, who on earth eats their lunch whilst taking a shite? I've heard of multi-tasking but...
5. Loudly held mobile phone conversations, usually business related. It seems unlikely that the person on the other end is aware of their contact's location during these.

On a related note, what is with American washroom stalls? The gaps at the top, bottom and hinges of the doors are seemingly designed to allow an unfettered view of the squatting occupant. Call me old-fashioned, but being in plain sight kind of puts me off...

(When I was small, I always hated using the restrooms at my grade school given their evil-smelling nature, so more than once I would avoid them for the entire day when possible. Going home became something of an urgent affair.)

How rude! (For a start, I DID say 'grade school.')

A: wash their hands?

Being on a restroom thread, as we are, one cannot but enquire with certain concern -- in what manner, M'Lady, did you "always use a sink"?!

Then again, when you were small, THE CHRISTMAS TREES WERE TALL, remember?
So everything couldn't've been entirely bad, a few evil-smelling toilets notwithstanding.

*has a rare bout of otpimistic nostalgia himself, regarless of being once only too well acquinted, especially round x-mas times, with outdoors lavatories for boys at a certain small school in the heart of nowhere*
*could describe in detail some odious specimens piss-ice-sculpture, too*

a) Weirder still is how many don't flush and then immediately walk over to the sink and actually wash their hands. Like, if you had to put "things to remember after using the bathroom" in order, I'd think that "flush" would be more important than "wash hands" even if they should both be required.

b) Where I work nobody in the men's room bothers to check for feet under the door. They just yank on the fucken thing to see if it's locked or peek through the crack. At home most people would rap gently on the door right? I find myself saying things like "Yeah there's someone in here jackass. Wait your turn." And once for a particularly interested through-the-crack-peeker: "You better leave the bathroom now because if I figure out who you are when I'm done we're going to have a talk out back by the dumpster about you spying on me while I'm taking a shit."