crying in the bathroom

For my posts and article on organizational culture, I’ll be writing to you from the pre-pandemic office bathroom: the place where I used to go to find momentary solace, to break down, to text my partner, to face myself in the mirror. I’d go there to remind myself of who I am, and what my boundaries are. Office bathrooms were the places where I’ve commiserated with coworkers about the pervasion of tech bro culture. They were the places where schemes for solidarity were assembled. Office bathrooms were where human physiological & emotional needs asserted themselves over business goals. 

Amira, you’re not seriously going to bring up bathrooms in every post… are you? I sure hope not. But I do think that bathrooms represent more than just a place to piss, shit and ideally wash your hands. They are a place where gender expression enforcement transpires (see “Public Bathrooms are gender battlefields. What if we do it right?”). They’ve been a basic right that Amazon has deprived its warehouse workers of (see “Amazon worker skip bathroom breaks to keep their jobs, says report”). Additionally, from my experience as a remote knowledge worker in the COVID-19 pandemic, they represent a space that doesn’t really exist for me anymore. How do I mark boundaries for my physical body and what it needs, when there’s no “digital context” for me to express that very human boundary? In this brave new remote world, we pretend that we are machines (see “Our Workplaces Think We’re Machines. We’re Not”), that we exist only as 2-dimensional chatbot avatars of ourselves. We can’t ever leave the office space - because in digital form it can be everywhere. That is, unless workers and organizations advocate to humanely redesign the nature of remote and hybrid work.

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bathroom photo by intan Indiastuti