Eight Days in the Restroom
Photo by Hakeem James Hausley from Pexels
In China’s face-saving culture we had found the ultimate loophole. There were three of us in that small four person office that had made an agreement. Whenever one of us would skip out on work early, the other two would cover if the boss came looking for them.
“Where’s so and so?” (“谁谁谁在哪儿呢？”)
“They just went to the restroom!” （“他刚去厕所了“）
That was what we said – “They just went to the restroom” – so simple, so elegant, so unacceptably awkward if the boss were to actually attempt verification.
He was no dummy. When he heard this phrase, the boss knew the person had left for the day. We knew that he knew that they’d left for the day. And he knew that we knew that he knew. But still everyone politely smiled and acted like the person had stepped out and would be back any moment now.
As is the case in most offices, for every four people on the job, one person is doing the work of three. Normally, this overloading of tasks and possible scapegoating falls on the youngest member of the team. That’s because they have something to prove and possess reserves of youthful energy.
We had one of those as well, a recent college graduate (English name Peter) who was eager to please. This new kid on the block hustled harder than the rest of us combined. His honest, strait-laced approach to work, however, barred him from entry into our bathroom alliance.
The abuse of this system was taken to exciting new heights when I left the continent for 8 days to attend a friend’s wedding in Atlanta. (A distance of 12,345 km from my desk chair). No request for leave. No handover of project responsibilities.
Just our ironclad pact to never rat each other out.
***
Having contacts in the airline industry, I often flew on a standby ticket. The way stand-by works is that you let the check-in counter people know you’ve arrived. Once everyone else has checked in and gone through the gate, if there are any spots remaining on the plane, they let you know that you’ll be on the flight.
It’s a nerve-wracking experience, the uncertainty of it all. You could end up in first class, champagne and mimosas, in the low-key quiet atmosphere that surrounds rich people. Did you know they have legitimately nice people working as flight attendants up there?
But you could also end up in coach – cheap headphones, plastic wrapped bread rolls, and neck pillows engineered to support the human head for no longer than twelve hours.
You could not get on the flight at all. Take the walk of shame back out to the airport shuttle, having just ridden the bus there.
Flying on an airplane removes the false veil that we control our lives. A mile up in the air, flying along in a metal tube, we hope that the pilot is mentally fit and the person who did the safety checks on the turbine engine didn’t just get up and go to the restroom.
Flying standby is a form of spiritual discipline – a sitting with the anxiety attached to uncertainty.
God was speaking to me as I stood in line, fidgeting. I became aware that there was nothing I could do but stay and wait. It made me stop and become aware of my desire to control something that was completely outside of my control. Coming from a culture that is allergic to the unknown I got through that experience with difficulty.
We want to know and feel like we can know. We want life spelled out for us. There is an unwritten roadmap that we follow and when life deviates from the plan we are filled with anxiety, anger, and sadness.
If you really boil it down, the anxiety comes from a lack of control. External circumstances would dictate this amazing trip to Atlanta and there was nothing I could do to make it happen or not happen.
The discipline of stopping takes us to a dry and empty space, where we can hear all the garbage: all the agreements and attachments we’ve made with the world.
Stand back and listen to the cacophony under the surface for me standing in line. A 31-year old child of a man, throwing a mental tantrum when the comfort of complete certainty is removed from him for only a brief moment.
***
In the end, it all worked out perfectly. I sipped mimosas with beautiful people on the flight back and enjoyed a guilty week away from the office. There was little to no break in my workflow. With the pre-pandemic “butts in seats” mentality, that week away was a foreshadowing of the remote work world yet to come.
When I arrived back at the office, nearly eight days later, no one asked where I had been. Perhaps they didn’t notice I’d left or maybe they had and chose not to prod. In this face-saving culture, better to leave uncertainty alone than to clarify the troubling details.
The whole time I was gone Peter had been chugging away at different projects, still eager to impress the boss and make a name for himself in the office. According to one of my comrades he’d also eaten a deliriously spicy Korean dinner the night before. The gochujang sauce was working at his uninitiated intestines and Peter spent most of the morning shuttling between desk and restroom.
Everything in my office was exactly as I’d left it. As divine providence would have it, my boss had also been out of office for the entire past week, attending a conference in Barcelona. He was clearly reinvigorated by his work trip to Spain. I could hear him whistling down the hallway, coming to check in on his four subordinates.
The door opened and he looked around.
“Is Peter here today?” (今天Peter在吗？)
“He’s here.” (在的)
“Where is he?” (人呢？)
“He just went to the restroom!” （刚上了厕所）
The boss made a grumpy snort. All the positivity and optimism from the past week drained out of his face. He closed the door and walked away angrily.
“Wow, that lazy jerk is just as useless as the rest of them!!! ”, he thought to himself.