My Boss Timed My Bathroom Breaks to the Second

I answered phones for a health insurance company, which is the kind of job that ages you like a two-term president. But the calls were not the problem. The calls I could handle. The problem was Gary.

Gary was our team lead, and Gary loved metrics the way a dog loves a tennis ball -- completely, mindlessly, and forever. Everything we did was a number on Gary's wall. Average handle time. Calls per hour. "Adherence," which was a percentage of how closely your actual butt-in-seat time matched the schedule down to the minute.

And then there was AUX time. When you stepped away from your phone for any reason, you had to put yourself in an "AUX code." AUX 1 was lunch. AUX 2 was a team meeting. AUX 4 was the bathroom. And Gary, our Gary, watched the AUX codes in real time on a big monitor, the way normal men watch football.

One day I came back from the bathroom and there was a sticky note on my monitor. It said, in Gary's handwriting, "AUX 4 -- 6 min. Everything ok?"

Six minutes. He had clocked that I was in the bathroom for six minutes and felt that six minutes was a length of time that required a welfare check. Or, more accurately, a warning shot.

So I did what any reasonable adult does when their manager starts timing their bladder. I started fighting back with the only weapon available: petty, deliberate compliance. I read the AUX code policy. The whole thing. And nowhere -- nowhere -- did it define a maximum length for AUX 4. So the next day I put myself in AUX 4 and I took exactly as long as my body required, which some days was two minutes and some days, out of pure spite, was longer.