ZOOM POOPS

This month marks three straight years of working from home for me. In many ways, it doesn’t seem like three years as parts of me still think it’s 2020. On the other hand, my life of waking up early and commuting to work seem like it was a dream. Did I ever even have to be somewhere else to do work?

Even as my employer is readying a new studio space for my team, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be stopping working from home anytime soon.

One game I play almost everyday is something I call, “is there enough time for me to poop before I have to attend this Zoom meeting?”. This game gets played frequently for a few reasons. First, most of my meetings happen in the mornings. Second, my body really wants to poop in the mornings as well. The combination of those two things frequently leads to conflicting needs.

It doesn’t take me a long time to poop. Without going into much detail, but if my butt is on the toilet seat, I’m guaranteed to be taking care of business. As such, I can squeeze a poop into a fairly short window of time. I can’t imagine if I was one of those constipated people.

If there’s ten minutes to go before my meeting, that’s an eternity for a poop. I don’t even hesitate to go, as I know I’ll have a leisurely time. If I have five minutes, that’s also great. I can do everything I need to do in five minutes. At three minutes, that’s where it starts to get interesting. I have gone and pooped with three minutes before a Zoom call. With this much time or lack thereof, every second counts, so I need to be doing something every second. If I’m not expelling poop out of my butt, then I gotta be wiping. If I’m not wiping then I’m flushing. If I’m not flushing, then I’m washing my hands.

At the extreme, I have gone to poop with two minutes before a Zoom call. These are usually very dire circumstances. I obviously wouldn’t wait that long before going to poop, so either the need just crept up on me suddenly or I was stuck in another meeting while needed to poop badly and found myself with just two minutes to go before the next one. A two-minute poop is just not great time. Everything is just rushed too much. It’s only done so that I don’t have to feel the need to poop while in the meeting.

Personally, I think going to poop a minute before a meeting is not doable. If this happens, corners will be cut. Parts of you will be left messy or if not, then you’ll be late to a meeting. Now, you might be wondering, have I gone and pooped while in a Zoom call. The answer is yes. If I recall correctly, it happened once. My camera was obviously off. I was muted. It was a meeting where at least ten people were present. I knew beforehand that I wasn’t going to speak and I also did not expect anyone to ask me questions. The meeting was purely informational, so I was there to just listen anyways. The great thing about having a wireless headset and mic is that I can move pretty far from my computer and still be engaged in a meeting. To be very clear, I would never poop in a one-on-one meeting. There are boundaries and lines in the toilet that I would never cross. This is one of them.