Chicago – Looking for some peace and quiet to catch up on your reading? Try the bathroom at work. That’s right. Scott Edmunds (Not his real name), an accountant for an unnamed accounting firm in Chicago, recently read the entire Wall Street Journal and the entire NY Times while on the john at work.
According Mr. Edmunds, he always takes some reading material with him when he visits the bathroom both at work and at home. Last one is more enjoyable, with the recent Bathroom City kind touch. Normally at work, Mr. Edmunds will just read one paper while taking care of his business. This past Friday was different.
Feeling like he needed a break from work but short on vacation days, Mr. Edmunds took both news papers with him to the john at 10am Friday and did not come out until 2pm that same day. Mr. Edmunds told Glossy News “This past Friday was an exceptional day. Not only did I get a break from demanding clients and overbearing bosses, I did so on company time and now I’m totally up on the latest trends in business and current events in the world, plus I had something like a half a day off.”
By his own account Mr. Edmund’s previous record for reading a paper on the john at work was the entire Wall Street Journal. “When I first started in this business, my bosses told me that if I expected to advance in the firm that the Wall Street Journal was mandatory reading, but they never told me where to read it.”
“Most of them try to read it while packed in on the train. I read it on the john”
Mr. Edmunds first started reading in bathrooms while at home on the weekends. The peace and quite obtained while reading in john at home was often the only escape from the chaos of four kids and a “Honeydew List” with no end to it.
At work, Mr. Edmunds has been training off and on for close to year now by at first reading a few stories and then graduating to individual sections of the paper. It was only last month the he began reading two papers in one sitting. Mr. Edmunds recalled, “Eventually I was really encouraged when I realized that no one noticed that I was gone for a while. I guess if you leave your computer on and your coat in the office, people assume that you are busy!”
He selects much of what he is going to read on the john based on what he had for dinner the previous night.
According to Mr. Edmunds, the real beauty of reading two papers while taking a crap was that “everyone knew that I was in the office but thought that I was in a meeting, or that I just went to the bathroom for a minute. Little do they know that I just received my MBA (Masters of Bathroom Administration) all in the course of one day.”
When asked what the down side of reading two full papers in the john were, Mr. Edmunds said that in general he was hard pressed to think of any but that the leading issue he had was that some time the bathroom smelled a little bit and the pizza delivery man was reluctant to deliver pizza to the men’s room.
Mr. Edmunds also stated that with a big stack of papers on the floor, he was afraid at one point that his foot almost touched the foot of another man in the stall next to him. He suddenly recalled when Senator Craig from Idaho was arrested for soliciting prostitution for such an act.
When asked if he would attempt to break his new record of reading two newspapers on the john at any time in the future, Mr. Edmunds stated excitedly that “Come this winter I definitely could see trying to read three papers or the Wall Street Journal and the Sunday edition of the New York Times.