Blog a Day June: Office Etiquette (Part 2)

Office Etiquette Pet Hate number 507.

Telephones and Toilets

At work, the bathroom is your place of solace. It is the place where you can get away from your desk for a while. It is the place where you can have a few moments of silent contemplation.

A toilet cubicle, at work, is not a place to take private phone calls.

For one, it's not private. Everybody can hear you. It's a private call you try and make in the loo but it's not private when everybody can listen in.

Secondly, does the person on the other end of the phone really want to hear the ablutions of others. Women's toilets are notoriously noisy places, what with hand dryers and flushings and goodness knows what else going on. Working with child bearing aged women, you get the odd puker. It's not a quiet place to make a call.

Thirdly, okay, quietly texting from a toilet cubicle could be seen as semi okay (that or a quick game of Candy Crush) but you know what sort of microscopic organisms populate a bathroom. Really. Do you really want faecal matter on something that goes so near your hands and face? No indeed.

Seriously, toilets aren't the place for phones. In the area with the basins, okay, maybe, for a second - but even then.

The bathrooms at work really need to be kept a phone free zone.

Here endeth the lecture.