The closest I’ve come to doing this is telling someone to hold on while I put the phone down and run to the bathroom to pee. And that has only happened with my mom or best friend - people who are known to do the same to me! These phone converstations are usually quite long, so we often just take a bathroom break and get back to the conversation in a few minutes.
But bringing it into the washroom with me? Never.
I saw a thing on 20/20 or something the other day. A guy had a waterproof techo center installed in his shower. He could email, phone, check stocks, etc., while showering. Sorry…I refuse to be connected every second of the day. No one is so important that they can’t take 10 minutes to shower. If someone is going to push the button to end the world, a tap on the door would be just as effective.
Public bathrooms and phones don’t mix for me. I will admit to talking to people while “dropping the kids off at the pool” while at home, but I don’t flush until after the conversation has ended and I have hung up… This usually happens when I am trying to reach customer support for some company and I am placed on hold while the one person that works in customer service for the entire company attempts to answer all the calls.
Thank you sneezy5660, that absolutely cracked me up.
Personally, I get embarrassed if my cellphone even rings when I’m in the bathroom. There’s no way I would actually answer it on the toilet. Heck, I get creeped out when people who are physically there talk to me in the bathroom.
Here is my offense: talking on the phone while my KIDS are in the bathroom. Well, one kid. My son, when he was approximately 3-6 years of age, could not tolerate the confines of a public building without having to poop. Insisting that he go before leaving didn’t make the slightest difference. I am well-aquainted with all public restrooms in the metro area, be they grocery, restaurant, office or store, thanks to him.
One of his jaunts occurred while we were at a birthday party at a local gym type place, with a huge indoor play-place. Off I go, to sit and wait the 15 or so minutes it takes him to complete his business. I have neither book, magazine nor newspaper to read – yet I had been meaning to call my sister-in-law about an upcoming get-together. So I place the call and we chat while I pace the echoing chamber, laughing a little at my little hostage situation. 
I got off a good one-liner while whizzing during a phone call. I was talking to a female acquaintance of mine who heard the stream. She asked, “Are you holding your johnson while you’re talking to me?”
I replied, “I always do!”
I went into one of the restrooms at work last week and discovered that a coworker from another department has started using it as a private office. Two or three days in a row I went in and heard her chatting away on her cell phone in one of the stalls. I thought maybe she just wanted privacy, but a quick peek under the door revealed that she was sitting on the toilet. It sounded like a business call, too.
The bathroom in my apartment has a phone jack right above the toilet. IIRC, this feature was listed in the complex’s marketing materials at one point. (No, I don’t have a phone hooked up in there, and I don’t plan on getting one.)
I always (perhaps kindly) assumed that landline phones in hotel and home bathrooms were in case of emergency. In case you fall or become incapacitated. I will continue to believe this.
Nurses, professionals, mind you! Otherwise fine ladies who do good works
talking on their cell phones whilst moving their bowels and tinkling!!!
I was shocked and dismayed. Infection control! Disinfect that little germ-riddled device you are clutching in your filthy filthy mitts, drop it into your nasty pocketses and wash those hands!
Eew, eew, eew. And I eat lunch with these people! (Well, not anymore!)
I am also opposed to people talking on the phone in public bathrooms. Do whatever you want in your own bathroom but I don’t want to hear you discussing your dinner plans while you are peeing. I have a hard time going to the bathroom while I can hear someone else on the phone…it freaks me out. I end up just sitting and waiting for them to finish.
Is this an American thing? Something about silence=rudeness being taken to pathological levels? 'Cause when I’m indisposed, I want ANONYMITY. And no-one has ever tried to strike up a conversation with me in the loo.
Second thing - here is a question which sets the etiquette threshold for this subject. Accepting that it is a hideous social no-no to poo/pee while on the phone, is it OK to do it when talking to telemarketers?
Third thing - horrible tale of causing embarrassment. I’m prosecuting a drug trial. Principle evidence is taped conversations with a covert police officer (a woman). My preparation was a bit pressed, so I had prepared the case from the transcripts (yeah, not great, you’re supposed to listen to the tapes, but it was a time/priorities thing.)
So I am taking the CPO through evidence in chief, playing the relevant tapes as we go.
Now, the actual playing of the tapes is boring in a trial. Crappy druggie conversations are not interesting, and since the transcripts tell you what’s going to be on the tapes, you can wisely use your time focussing on other stuff, right? Wrong.
As the tapes are playing, I am attending to other bumf, I note that we have come to a silent patch in the tapes. Of course, there is no transcript of silence, but I think nothing of it. My subconscious needles me that some methods of CPO recording prevent the CPO from being able to turn the recorder on and off herself. Trying to get a sense of what’s happening I look up at the witness. A look of pure pleading is in her eyes. She’s been following. She knows what’s coming.
My subconscious pricks me again. Something during the last recorded piece of conversation from her about “I’ll be back in a sec?”. You can see where this is going.
So I am on my feet…a microsecond too late. My pathetic “Adjournment, Your Honour?” is practically lost in …what (in context) sounds like this thundering Niagara, this racehorse-on-diuretics, this echoing, echoing noise that floods the courtroom. And then stops. To pin-drop silence. With all eyes on me, now. I don’t think my agonised memory is making it worse that it was.
The look of horror, mortification and embarrassment on the poor policewoman’s face will haunt me to the grave.
Indeed. And my parents once rented a penthouse apartment in New York which had two lines in the bathroom.
I never make calls, but my wife must have a GPS planted on me, so that she calls whenever I go at work.
The trouble is, I don’t want to tell her why I don’t want to talk while I’m performing the action that makes me not want to talk.
Great story Noel. I’m studying Litigation at the moment. Perhaps I should suggest to my lecturer that she use your experience as an edifying case study?
The biggest problem with that is the echo. You can’t hear what the other guy is saying when your in the bathroom.
toilets and telephones? no big deal
I saw a guy urinating AND eating at the same time.
Although I have been known to take a leak with a beer in my hand while talking to somebody no less.
It wasn’t my first beer. 
Thanks, C. I tell the story against myself when talking to Bar Prac students as a cautionary tale about how failure to attend to detail will nail you. But if you practise for any length of time at all, you will (not might) develop your own repetoire of such stories, believe me. Part of the joy of the Bar (and the criminal Bar in particular) is the acquisition of War Stories. Let’s not hijack too far, but are you at Sydney? UNSW? Planning to go to the Bar?
You have to wonder, who finds the conversation engrossing enough to not hang up on the pig in these cases.
How many times do they get confused, and wipe with the phone, and stick the paper in their ear? Excuse me, did you know you have tiolet paper stuck to your ear? Do you have shit for brains or what?
Okay, how about sitting on the can with your pants down, eating Chinese food from a styrofoam take-out container on your lap? I shit (ha, ha) you not. I was walking by the stalls and really smelled the food, so I kind of peeked through the door crack as I went by. A guy was sitting/shitting in there eating.
Oh, by the way Noel Prosequi, he was a lawyer!
My mom used to take her morning tea in with her. Granted, she was in there a long time, but it really grossed me out. Don’t you know there are poop germs floating everywhere??
Absolutely! Anything goes as far as telemarketers are concerned. Etiquette does not apply to telemarketers.
Day-um! Now that’s just efficiency run amok.