Getting your shit together
or everything is rainbows and dolphins
Back when I had my last office job - pre-Covid - I felt like an alien who’d landed on a strange planet. I was working for a university, writing ‘how to’ articles for an online knowledge bank that was ultimately designed to replace the people who had the knowledge. The role involved interviewing ‘subject matter experts’ (SMEs to those in the know) and describing in step-by-step detail any idiot could follow, how to do a particular task or solve a particular problem. It was a nascent idea. Managers were working it out on the fly. Instructions could change from one day to the next.
I once wrote a 4-page article on how to make a room booking. Afterwards, at our weekly ‘stand up meeting’ I said to my manager, ‘You know no one is going to read this, right? They’ll see how long it is and call the help desk.’
My protests went unheard.
I continued writing.
I once spent three days writing articles about how to apply for each of the 10 or so different parking permits available, only for the parking tsar - the only employee who knew anything about the system and who kept a very tight grip on the ins and outs - to announce there’d be changes to the permit system starting the following year, rendering my ‘how to’ articles effectively obsolete within seconds.
Oh well, it was their money.
Offices are strange places. Here’s what I reckon you shouldn’t do in offices - especially open plan ones:
eat lunch at your desk
eat tuna, anything crunchy or any citrus fruit at your desk
talk loudly about what you did on the weekend while the person next to you and almost touching your elbow with theirs is trying to write, especially if it is about how your dog went in the dog show trials on the weekend
slurp tea or coffee
sigh
There was a strange mix of corporate safety and dog-eat-dog survival instinct at play in this workplace. On the carpeted walls there were signs reminding employees about bullying and championing diversity, while around me the people who rose to the top were mostly white and often bullies. There were tissue boxes and industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitiser on every desk (and this was BEFORE Covid). There were staff meetings where, in front of a whole team, managers would announce the need for cutbacks to the lower ranks then call out a few names asking people to stay behind at the end while the rest of us shuffled apologetically past them.
Our team manager once made a big deal about organising a ‘thank you for your hard work’ lunch. She’d booked a table at a local pub, sent us an email lettings us know we were ‘allowed’ to have one drink each then, after the meal, excused herself early and left without paying for any of it. When we found out that we had to pay, we sat there gobsmacked. One of the team didn’t actually have enough money to cover what she’d eaten. If this was meant to be a team bonding exercise, it worked. We were united in our outrage. ‘No offence’ one of the them said to the rest of us, ‘but if I’d known I was going to have to pay, I wouldn’t have said yes to having lunch with you.’ We all agreed.
Anyway, what I started off wanting to say about this workplace, was that when I needed to do a poo there I’d search out a special cubicle, which in my head I called ‘the poobicle’. Being undisturbed there wasn’t guaranteed, but it was definitely more likely than in the toilets closer to one of the ‘hot’ desks.
I thought about my poobicle lately when I read about a social media campaign being run by the Queensland Department of Health reminding people ‘It’s OK to poo at work’.
Some of the comments on Qld Health’s Instagram page are pretty funny.
One user says: Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I poo on company time!
Another writes: Literally seeing this while on the toilet at work!
In an article about the Queensland health initiative, Simon Robert Knowles Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Swinburne University of Technology describes this shyness of bowel and the potential health impacts.
What is parcopresis?
Parcopresis, sometimes called “shy bowel”, occurs when people experience a difficulty or inability to poo in public toilets due to fear of perceived scrutiny by others.
Knowles’ research asked students to assess which cubicle they’d use in a shopping centre if they needed to take take a dump.
In each vignette participants were advised they were at a local shopping centre and they needed to have a bowel motion. In the vignettes, the bathrooms (which had been recently cleaned) had configurations of either two or three toilet stalls. Each vignette differed by the configuration of stalls available.
My mother used to bundle into the cubicle with me when I was a kid then proceed to tear strips of toilet paper off and lay them around the seat and then, in what seemed like a needless extra precaution, lift me up in the seated position so I hovered about the whole scenario anyway. So, clearly 7 & 8 above are the only viable options for me.
The world falls into two categories: the poo-shamed and the poo-freelies. This may, or may not, all be linked back to mothers.
(side note, another of my mother’s favourite habits was to ask, ‘what will the neighbours think?’ - see note re. options 7 & 8 above).
Which leads me to another poo-related and final topic. Those envelopes you receive when you turn 50.
Yeah buddy. I see that expression. It’s not screaming rainbows and dolphins, is it?
As someone whose friend found out they had bowel cancer from one of those tests. I’m keen to get the message out - and here it is.
You’re 50 now.
It’s time to get your shit together.
I haven’t had to get my shit together yet because I have regular colonoscopies. Last time I had one the anaesthetic wore off before they’d finished the procedure. I woke up on my side, being jostled around by the surgeons. I was face-to-face with my anaesthetist. I said to her, ‘Excuse me, I don’t think I’m meant to be awake,’ then, after a moment’s hesitation ‘so do I still need to do one of those tests?’.
‘No,’ she said. Then my lights went out.
And the moral of this story? Two for the price of one:
If you are going to do shit at work, you may as well get paid for it and,
2. get your shit together.