Now, this is utterly uncalled for; the supervisor perhaps should have been watching the office personnel, not the working men.
I was an accountant at the now-defunct Nebraska Department of Health a long time ago, and since I can't hear, rather than listening to people, I used to watch people.
There was one guy, an assistant director of one of the larger agencies within the department, who used to show up for work punctually at 8:01 a.m. every morning. He would go to his desk, quickly read the telephone messages left for him, and then grabbing the morning's editions of the Omaha and Lincoln newspapers, head for the men's restroom. He would sit on the can for at least half an hour, and then having read the newspapers, pull up his pants and go back to his office.
Every single day. I was there three and a half years. Every single day he did this.
He had a nice house out in the country, with three bathrooms (he had a wife and two sons), all of them pretty much state-of-the-art facilities. Why he didn't do this sitting-down business before coming to work, I don't know--and trust me, lower-level employees, such as secretaries and file clerks, would get into trouble if someone thought their use of the restrooms was excessive.
And alas this one guy wasn't the only case. At the time, one could smoke in the bathrooms of the state office building, If not otherwise busy with work, I would grab a cigarette and go take a census. There were eight stalls in the men's restroom, and most of the time all eight stalls were, uh, occupied.
One could recognize the inhabitants by their shoes.
These were always upper-level managerial and supervisory guys.
Years later, I became manager of a privately-owned student union at the University of Nebraska; one of my first edicts to employees (there were about 60 of them) was "no sitting-down business in the restrooms on company time."
The rule applied to males only; I had no control over what the females did.
There was one kid, now an electrical engineer with the U.S. Navy on that lower peninsula of Maryland, who protested at the rule. He pointed out he had classes from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. nearly every day, with no breaks (other than the five minutes in between them), and then he was expected to show up for work at 5:01 p.m., staying until 1:00 a.m.
He insisted there wasn't any time.
Tough shit, I told him.
