Getting Drunk in First Class

We have a guest posting today, with my own observations following. -MensaMember

Semi-Valuable Observations: The Men’s Bathroom

There has been a lot written on how to tell what is going on in an IT shop. Some theories talk about looking at the number of Dilbert cartoons that are posted on the walls of people’s cubicles or the general level of office cleanliness as metrics to gauge the morale and professionalism of the IT environment. All of those theories have merit, but they take time to assess.

I have a better process.

In my observations of thousands of IT people in over 50 client engagements over the last decade, [MensaMember: Why have you been in consulting this long? Ouch.] the behaviors of the IT staff in the men’s bathroom tells much about an IT organization AND it only takes 5 minutes to complete. While I am sure that I could get NIH grant money to validate all of these theories, you can judge this yourself.

Corollary #1: The presence of the current day’s newspaper in one or more stalls indicates that people do not want to be at their desks doing their job.

MensaMember: See Shnaps for an alternative to newspaper reading that promotes good health.

Unless the IT staff is composed of mostly 60 plus year old males with prostate problems, the presence of newspapers indicates that people are hiding in the bathroom for extended periods of time. While it might be considered innocent to see just the sports section in a stall, the presence of the Opinion/Editorial section should be considered more serious. The most serious indication of a morale problem would be the paper opened to the New York Times crossword puzzle AND the puzzle was halfway completed.

Corollary #2: The quality of the toilet paper is directly related to the quality of software, hardware, and resources that management is willing to pay for.

When you are sitting there on the commode, don’t forget to check the toilet paper. Do you really think a company will buy the best of breed software, hardware and services to do the job right if they are stocking the bathroom with 40 grit toilet paper? Or how about the wafer thin tissue paper that falls apart and balls up in your ass hairs? No chance. You can pretty much count on there being a bunch of 10 year old Novell servers still running at the site and that there were no bonuses for the IT staff the past year if your rear end hurts after you wipe. If there is bleeding, you are definitely in the IT shop from hell. And if there is no toilet paper in any of the stalls, it means the IT budget is non-existent.

Corollary #3: The percentage of males that actually wash their hands after using the facilities directly corresponds to the level of maturity and professionalism of the IT staff.

We all know washing our hands is good for our long term health and for the health of others we work with. Guys who are in too big of a rush always bypass healthy and appropriate procedures. The “non-washers” typically have poor or no documentation for the systems they are responsible for. They frequently bypass change control process and make changes on the fly. Just like you do not want to shake the dirty hands of these people, you probably do not want to inherit their work either.

MensaMember: It has also been suggested that the percentage of an IT shop that washes their hands before handling their business is directly proportional to the average pedigree of the computer science education the developers received (if such concept exists). These people recognize that their hands touch more dirty things in a day than their harvey balls do.

Corollary #4: Actual toilet flushing is proportional to the level of application stability in the IT organization.

If an IT employee is too lazy to flush a “turd” down the same commode that you use, what makes you think that he will actually properly cleanup any problem in the IT environment? Just like corollary #3, being considerate of the “next guy” is a sign of maturity. The lack of toilet flushing, can also a sign of poor morale. People who are burned out and miserable not only “don’t give a shit”, they frequent won’t flush one either.

Whether you are a sales person, a consultant, or even a person that is coming on site for a job interview, just spend 5 minutes in the bathroom in the IT area and you will get an accurate understanding of what is going on in the IT shop.

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MensaMember’s Additional Thoughts:I find merit in this theory. The following behaviors were witnessed in the bathrooms of the worst IT shops I have had the displeasure to work with.

1. For background, you could set your watch to my morning meeting. If I get off schedule, then things can take longer. If I am having a rough session, I am particularly conscious of who else might be in a nearby stall. The standard procedure is to duck down quickly to memorize the pairs of shoes visible under the dividers, praying you do not catch someone else in the middle of the same act and wonder whether it is appropriate to wave. Over the course of several months, disturbing patterns arise. Why do the same brown toecaps always seem to be present before and after your arrival, no matter the length of your meeting? Why does this person always cough, sniffle, shift, or blow their nose when you enter your provisional throne room? You begin to walk around the client looking only down at shoes. This is never enlightening however, as the brown toecaps seem not to exist outside the restroom.
2. At another client, urinals were never clean, even though I always saw the cleaning staff scrubbing them spotless at the ungodly hour I left. What kind of drunk, workaholic bastard is whipping out the fire hose, letting loose, and then running up and down the row of urinals, painting the town golden, jumping and spinning in circles?
3. Men were not alone. Female consultants reported the seemingly impossible sight of urine sprinkled all over a client toilet seat. Either men were sneaking in to glaze the seat hole and show the women what they were missing in the men’s room, or the women were “hovering” much too high. [MensaMember: Perhaps the client should engage us for a disposable toilet seat cover vendor evaluation?]
4. At what point in your protracted career at a solitary IT department do you find yourself so comfortable that you would ignore the buffer space of available urinals to pull up next to a stranger such as myself and announce yourself with a witty little fart? I knew of nothing appropriate but to respond in brief by commenting, “Nice push.”
5. One DBA released so much gas and smelled so foul that I expensed a can of Oust odor eliminating spray and one bottle of the cheapest Kathy Lee Gifford perfume available at K-Mart. The Oust was not used, only left on the desk to make the point. The perfume was emptied onto his seat and cube walls.
6. Information Technology is not the only place one can observe poor lavatory etiquette. Answering phone calls in the bathroom stall is wildly inappropriate. I taught one man this lesson in a severe way, and although we have never actually met (black leather wingtips), I am sure he would now thank me. This man, Jack, took a call from Reagan National Airport’s shitter regarding some sort of upcoming sales effort for a prospective client named Elizabeth. Jack asked the other party for Elizabeth’s phone number, which he proceeded to repeat out loud, and we both proceeded to enter into our phones from adjoining stalls. He then called Elizabeth to arrange a date and time for an oral presentation. Thirty minutes later I blocked my caller ID and left Elizabeth a message. I told her she should not consider working with a man who would discuss her business openly while allowing feces to flow from his body in a public place. I let her know that this man’s name was Jack, and he would be presenting to her at the date and time I unwittingly heard.

It is a client’s world, but you have to work in it. If you are abused by your client’s bathroom and cannot sit comfortably on a clean toilet seat, fight back. Defecate in the upper reservoir of the toilet. In consultant slang, this is known as the Upper Deck Gambit.