Surreptitious observations.

Sometimes when I go into the bathroom at work I can tell who is sitting on the toilet because the person laboring in the stall has their name badge clipped to their pants and their pants around their ankles.  I’ve thought that this is pretty funny because it makes the situation a lot less private for the person even granting that they are already toiling in a tiny box with walls that don’t go all the way down to the floor.

Today while I was sitting in the bathroom I thought about this and I realized that this would never happen to me because I only push my pants down to above my knees when I’m on the toilet. I briefly tried pushing my pants down to my ankles, exposing my knees for all the me to see, and it just felt weird. I know that people really do use the toilet that way because of those tell-tale name badges but I don’t understand why.

That won’t keep me from wild speculation, of course. Here are some reasons to pull your pants to your ankles during toilet time:

1. You don’t really need to flush anything, it is just that your knees get really hot and you use the toilet as an excuse to cool off.
2. You are taking a test and you wrote your notes out in full on your thighs.
3. You forgot that you weren’t going to take a shower until your pants hit your shoes and then you were just too disappointed with yourself to do anything but sit down.
4. You are trying to find the man who killed your wife and you suffer from anterograde amnesia so you need to quickly reference a tattoo.
5. You have a birthmark on your knee that is shaped like a baby in a Nacho Libre costume because let’s face it you’d never get tired of looking at that.