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.

Gary escalated. Gary always escalated. He called a "quick team huddle," which is a phrase that should be illegal, and he stood in front of the whiteboard and said, without naming names but looking directly at me, that "some people" were "abusing AUX 4," and that going forward he would be "monitoring restroom breaks for coaching opportunities."

A grown man said "monitoring restroom breaks for coaching opportunities" to a room of adults, and we all just sat there, because that is what the job does to you.

Here is how it ended. One of my coworkers, a quiet woman named Rosa who I had never heard raise her voice, went to HR. Not to complain about the calls, not about the pay, not about any of the things that were actually wrong with that place. About the bathroom timing. She brought the sticky note -- because Gary had put one on her monitor too, hers said "AUX 4 -- 8 min :(", with a frowny face -- and she laid it on the HR rep's desk like evidence in a murder trial.

Turns out there are laws about that. Actual laws. You cannot deny an adult reasonable bathroom access, and you definitely cannot leave passive-aggressive frowny-face sticky notes about it that create a lovely paper trail.

Gary got moved to a different department. Not fired, because they are never fired, but moved. Somewhere with no AUX codes to watch, where I imagine he stares at a wall and slowly withers. On his last day on our team, Rosa left a single sticky note on his empty desk.

It said, "Gary -- 4 years. Everything ok?"