Monday, March 29, 2010

Toilet sleeping

As my office is not a huge entity worthy of occupying a building or even a whole floor of a building on its own, we share a floor with 4 other companies. This is basically nothing particularly exciting and doesn't really cause me any problems or discomfort, just some infrequent bouts of curiosity on what our floor comrades might be doing for business (but never really enough to warrant the effort to google them and actually find out). Our floor comrades also seem to be quite regular companies with no particularly freaky people.

Sharing the floor means sharing some other spaces as well. One would be the small sink and wash up space and the other major shared space is the toilets. Again, this is not really any problem since they seem to consist of a regular boring bunch of salarymen of reasonable hygiene who are not punishing the toilets with more wear and tear than the cleaning staff can handle.

There is one issue though... I strongly suspect that a few people among our neighborhood companies are systematically taking post-lunch naps in the toilet booths. I can understand that the pressure on the toilets get a bit higher post-lunch, but every day from 1-3 pm the booths are chronically occupied... Once, when the need was quite pressing, I actually waited outside the booths for around 5 minutes in the hope of an opening but no luck. During my wait, no sound was heard from the booths, none of the regular natural bodily sounds, tearing of toilet paper and spinning of rolls or flushing. Just complete silence.




The thing that would contradict this theory is the lack of snoring noises but I am set to get to the bottom of this matter! With a gap between the door and the floor as well as between the door and the roof, some form of telescope could help me solve this pressing matter.

8 comments:

J said...

I suspect that there was indeed napping involved because, ahem, I've done it.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Ok, without meaning any dirty slant on this; but was this a deliberate nap where you sat on the seat with your pants on just napping out for a bit or a case of just falling aslepp while doing the deed?

William said...

I'd craft a plan. Something like coming in -every- day during that time, maybe multiple times, and talking on the phone really loudly (not in Japanese, for best effect) and making sure they can't sleep through it.

You'll probably find that things change... Or at least, one of them opens up. ;)

ThePenguin said...

I can imagine the headlines now... "Foreigner caught spying in company toilets... blog reveals strange obsession with bodily functions... police are not ruling out links to salaryman voyeur fetish video producers..."

J said...

No no, perfectly reasonable inquiry. Pants on, deliberate.

Martin said...

Well, now you really have to secretly place webcams in the bathroom stalls.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Well, it sounds like the reasonable thing to do is to set up a live webcam feed of the insides of the toilet booths and show it real time here in the blog!
Then later on I can maybe release it on DVD for some extra bucks!

purple pen said...

Hello!

I just found your blog and this entry (4 years late!). I was searching the net if sleeping in the toilet booth is normal. Cause, guess what?I started doing that when I started working as an ALT. haha! From this piece, I'm glad I'm not the only one. I thought I'm being insane.

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