What in the name of Og is going on? The last bastion of privacy in the workplace is the can, and that veil has now been torn and sullied by the evil happy-face.
This fellow takes a map into the bathroom, and upon his exit receives a reprimand from supervisors.
Granted, negotiation with a box cutter isn’t embraced by Dale Carnegie, but what is the big deal about reading in the bog?
Wally World must be afraid that if their employees read enough, they might learn that WalMart is the AntiChrist. This would have a negative impact on employee morale. :eek:
No no no…he was spotted with a map - he was clearly planning a mass breakout
Because if you’re reading in the can instead of quickly defecating and leaving, your wasting time–and time is money. Every minute that man spent reading instead of voiding his bowels was a minute that he wasn’t cutting boxes for WalMart ™. Could you imagine what would happen if WalMart ™ let employees read on the can? Would you rather read, or perform manual labor for minimum wage? Why, there’d be no one to greet you as you walked in, or quickly guide you to the part of the store that contains the high-quality merchandise you came to purchase, provide expert advice in the electronics department, or efficiently ring up your purchases when you’re ready to leave. They’d all be in the bathroom, reading. Work wouldn’t get done, and the resulting hemmorhoids from all the extra straining would be an enormous drain on WalMart ™’s generous health care packages. WalMart ™ would no longer be able to provide you, the consumer, with the inexpensive, high-quality consumer products you’ve come to expect.
Well, um, sarcasm aside, that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? He’s not there to read maps and if he’s not on a break he shouldn’t be reading, whether it’s in the restroom or elsewhere. There’s plenty more about Wal-Mart to be pissed off about; this is a total meh.
Metacom, I don’t know if you were being serious, but I have never heard of such a policy…I am sure most places don’t have one like that. There are generally plenty of people working at the stores I shop at…they are not all on the shitter reading. A decent manager, I am sure, would notice if an employee was gone for an hour.
This being Wal Mart I am shocked the employees don’t have to clock out to use the restroom.
Either that, or give employees a fixed amount of “shit time” that they can use each month. Unused “shit time” would not roll over to the next month, of course – it would be flushed away.
captaindoesnotlikeyou, I certainly wasn’t being serious. 
Yeah, and I could see a manager telling an employee to move along if they were actually spending a significant amount of time on the john, but making it a company-wide policy (and I’d be shocked if this “company-wide” policy was enforced on anyone but the lowest-level grunts: I have a hard time seeing my WalMart ™ counterpart in WalMart ™’s IT department getting treated like this) seems like an over-reaction. It seems one step above putting their heads into some sort of wiring-harness that can detect non-Wal*Mart related thoughts and reports those to their supervisor, or, better yet, delivers a painful-yet-safe electric shock to the genitals (OK, so it’s a pretty freaking long step, but still ;)).
Unless the employee abuses the privlege(!?!), bringing reading materials into the bathroom isn’t going to waste that much more company time then many other normal workplace activities, like making brief small talk with co-workers, smoking breaks, etc.
I’ve worked on non-salaried jobs, including a construction-type job in college, and there was plenty of social interaction not directly related to work going on. Are there any jobs out there, third-world sweatshops and call centers aside, where people show up and actually do nothing but work for 8 (or 12) hours?
I completely disagree with you…this is total feh, not meh.
I’ve seen it, very occassionally, on bars in hotels. Mind you, the people who did that were clearly ever-so-slightly odd in one way or another.
Box cutter? Shoot! I thought trebouchets were involved…
I dunno about that. Excuse the obvious pun, but this policy sounds exceedingly anal. Who cares if they read while they’re taking a crap, so long as they stop reading when they stop crapping? If an employee is spending forty-five minutes in the bathroom, yell at him for spending forty-five minutes in the bathroom. It doesn’t matter if he was in there reading Tolstoy or just staring at the walls, the issue is the amount of time he’s spending doing it.
I’d also say that under normal circumstances, a map is not reading material. If an employee is ducking into the bathroom with a armful of Stephen King novels, then I’d suspect there’s something more than just bowel movements going on. But a map is just something to look at because you’ve already read all the graffitti. It’s not like he’s sitting in there thinking, “I should really get back to work, but I want to find out where I-90 goes!” However, considering that, in this specific case, we’re also dealing with a knife wielding maniac, for all I know that might be exactly what he was thinking in there.
Yes, on assembly lines. Aside from regularly scheduled and strictly timed breaks, you are moving every single second. About the only thing you can do is try to “work ahead” a few units so you can take a breather while the line catches up. If you aren’t busting your butt all the time, they either speed up the line or give you extra stuff to do.
I did it for about three weeks as part of a company training program when I used to work in the automotive industry. I don’t know how long it takes to get used to, but it’s longer than three weeks, I guarantee.
Could be a crazed employee, could be a bad boss finally got what was coming to him. I’ve known, and known of, an awful lot of managers and employers whose unslit throats bespeak a wonderful generosity of spirit on the part of those working under them.
How does a manager enforce it if it’s not a policy? I’ve been the victim of disparate treatment from managers and the only leg I had to stand on was company policy. I was able to document that the manager wasn’t enforcing the policy equally and it was the manager who took the heat for it.
Smoke breaks other than regularly scheduled breaks during which employees smoke are grossly unfair to non-smokers. And whether an employee wastes time in one fashion or not has no bearing on stopping him from wasting it in another. It’s not about taking from the company. It’s about forcing your coworker to do more work to make up for your slack.
Why does anyone need to look at something while on the toilet? Seriously, I have never understood this.
I’m not quite sure either as I only did it for three months at a time. I can tell you that after the first month your brain starts to vege out. Then, as your body automatically performs whatever action it has been trained to do (mine was to wire in a dashboard for S-10 trucks. Color coded, no thought required.) your mind wanders off. I wrote whole books in my mind. And sooner or later something big and heavy smacks you because you aren’t paying attention. Like say, a dashboard. That leaves a mark, let me tell you. Another line favorite was to accidentally let the platform carrying the truck chasis roll over your foot. That would get you to pay attention for a few days before zoning out again.
But for obvious reasons, you can’t just run off to the bathroom.
“Sorry this truck didn’t come with a dashboard, but the guy really had to go…”
But we got timed breaks, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. And if you really had to go, the line boss could step in for you. (Unless he was an asshole, mine wasn’t fortunately.)
Actually, with union protection, I’ve seen folks just wander away from the line. The missing parts have to get put on before the truck ships. Real fun after a bunch of overlapping parts may have been put on.
But for Wally Mart, they are just being anal. I doubt the CEO gets demerits for reading the Wallstreet journal while on the pot. As others have noticed, if your employee is vanishing for 45 minutes at the time, you probably have bigger problems than reading in the bathroom.
The question I have is this: was it his map, or Wal*Mart’s map? If it was the latter, I can totally see this being a policy. I don’t think most customers would appreciate buying a map that had visited the shitter without them.
ftr, during the first couple years of college I worked in a Wal*mart over summer breaks and it wasn’t our store’s policy. Perhaps because it never occured to an employee…
I’m thinking the policy is more something along the lines of “do not take reading material from the store’s shelves into the can with you” as opposed to an all-around ban on reading in the bathroom. That sounds a bit more logical.
Uh, either way, I can’t really say it’s worth slashing people over, but to each his own.
Because it could be covered under a less specific policy, e.g., bathroom breaks shouldn’t be longer then is necessary to work it all out. Kinda like how we have a “don’t be a jerk” rule instead of 319 rules along the lines of “don’t call someone a stoma-felching kitten-raping bastard unless they called your God a chickenfucker in a forum other then the pit.”
Unless the non-smokers compensate by reading the Dope when their coworkers are out puffing away. 