I am sure there are another dozen in-office perks that CEO has that the average employee does not.
I am sure there are another dozen in-office perks that CEO has that the average employee does not.
I can poop outdoors on backpacking trips using natural materials to wipe, I can poop in busy airports and I can poop in stinking 100 degree portapotties.
But I have a really hard time pooping in gleaming offices where all my coworkers can see me walking into the bathroom and emerging 10 minutes later. I hate it!
The answer to the latter, if you are not a horrible person, is of course not. You don't really care, it's not your problem, you're not keeping track of it, it's just an event you forget moments later. Probably, then, that's what your coworkers think of you, when you go; so stop caring, because they definitely don't.
(If anyone ever were to metaphorically give me shit for using the bathroom, I'd turn it around on them in a heartbeat, too. It's so easy - just ask, what kind of creep cares about their coworker's bodily functions to this extent? Gross, weird!)
before WFH, I worked at a desk in an open floorplan. for whatever reason, it gives me a constant low level of anxiety to be in an environment where lots of people can see me, especially if I can't easily tell when people are actually looking. so I used to go to the bathroom a bit more often than I really needed, just so I could spend a few minutes in a more private space. I personally don't care, but I certainly do notice which of my coworkers also seem to be frequent users of the bathroom. if I were a pointy-haired boss, that might be one of the data points used to assemble my list of slackers.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, there's a passage about this, where the men discover a tremendous camaraderie about their shared shitting time - since there's no way to have privacy or any nicer facilities than what they can scrape together, it's basically just a purely functional experience. They sit in a field and provide each other dignity, instead of privacy; something we could well learn from.
Interestingly, the Romans also had this - https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTcxODU0MDM4OTM2MDY5N... - and it seems they did fine by it. It may be only really in relatively recent Western culture that we added a layer of shame over a natural act, and in turn required immense privacy for it. Wasn't the Tuilieries garden in Paris a place where fancy ladies might pop a squat?
I once worked at a startup with 300 people on a floor with one bathroom with 3 stalls. 90% men. You'd always be waiting, you'd always be voiding yourself next two two other people. Maybe people you'd be going back to sit next to in a few minutes. You begin to know things about people you don't want to know.
I myself of course do prefer the privacy, like most anyone, and further prefer a single occupancy bathroom because the hygiene opportunities are much better when you have direct and private access to a sink. I think the 300 people to 3 stalls situation was probably close to violating some kind of building code and at the very least it's just not a good example of treating your workers as though you value them.
On the far polar opposite, I worked at a startup that had 5 single-occupancy bathrooms for 50 people. Two of them had showers. It was so much nicer in every way.... just that feeling that you were as comfortable at work as you are at home. Not just cattle, but treated with modern dignity; there's a cost to the employer to do this, but it might actually have ROI in the sense that your employees are more comfortable and healthier.
Oddly enough, I think the shift to open offices deserves at least some credit here. I think most office spaces were designed with a median estimate of occupancy in mind. Before open offices, it was a mix of offices and cubicles, with much less density. When I worked in a cube farm, we had 4 stalls and 2 urinals for about 60-70 men on two floors. My most recent office had 2 single occupancy bathrooms for about 40 people. If we count the urinal as 0.5 toilet, we get almost double the per-bathroom density in the open office.
And the other confounding factor is when you combine open offices with cell phones, the bathroom turns into the 'Candy Crush break'. I imagine median occupancy times were lower back in the day, as lugging a newspaper or magazine to the bathroom was a little too obvious.
Here you need at least a stall and an urinal per twenty male occupants and two stalls per twenty female and the entrance can't be directly connected to the working space so you need to have an intermediate space (a corridor or a changing room for example).
I'm not American, friend. Poor conditions exist even in very nice places, simply because people don't get together and do anything about it. After all, who wants to be the Bathroom Advocacy Dude?