First, as a refresher, in studying the word “migrate,” it can be confused with the words, “emigrate” and “immigrate.” Emigrate means to leave one’s country to live in another country. Immigrate is to come into another country to live for good or permanently. Now migrate, is to just move, like birds and Yankees going to Florida in the winter.
Still confused? So am I…
It really depends on the sentence and the point of view, in that “emigrating” is to “immigrating” as going is to coming. So if you are leaving the docks, you are emigrating; if you are stepping onto the docks you are immigrating.
I think I have the right usage of the word migration, like the butterflies, birds and Yankees or “Snowbirds” as they are often called. You know, they leave the snowy north to come to the Sunny South and take advantage of the Earlybird and Two for One specials at the seafood restaurants and want great condominiums to rent for two or three months (at 10% of the summer rate). I’m not saying they are not nice people, they probably are for the most part. They just want sunshine and bargains.
This discussion is not about birds or butterflies or even retired folks who have a good time driving south to play cards and use coupons, it’s about folks, men in particular, who seem to migrate from their normal work areas to others’ work areas to make use of the bathrooms. It is a phenomenon that could be called “Stall Migration.”
At first this bothered me a lot because my office is very close to the bathroom. This is nice on one hand and not so nice on the other, but I needed to figure it out. There seems to be some sort of pattern to it actually. The men on the other end of the hall seem to walk right past their bathroom to the other end of the building to use “ours.”
On top of that, the men downstairs walk by their bathroom, go up the stairs and use the bathroom nearest the fellows who are migrating to our bathroom. This goes on and on and probably could be modeled or predicted if one had the time to do such things.
It just seemed odd to me. Odd, until I did a little research in my spare time.
There seems to be a condition, some call “Bathroom Stage Fright” where folks don’t like to use public restrooms. Honestly, I wouldn’t call that a condition, I’d just call it good sense. You have to be in a really bad way to use a side of the road gas station bathroom with the key attached (with a big chain) to a boat oar. I understand that.
So this was not necessarily the case with these guys migrating around the building to other bathrooms. One of the best explanations I found was in an article titled, “How The Most Successful People Poop at Work.” Catchy, isn’t it?
It’s simply what you would think… They don’t want the fellows in the office next to them hearing the sounds, seeing their shoes, timing them and such things. They even consulted a fellow who wrote, “The Psychology of the Bathroom.” What did he tell the folks who wrote the “Most Successful…” article? The obvious. He said, “Anything that distracts and discomforts workers can make them less productive.”
Makes you want to ask if this fellow goes out on the lecture circuit and gives $10,000 speeches on “Going in the Workplace” doesn’t it? It makes me curious. Perhaps, I could write some sort of software or one of those applications to go on cell phones where you locate the bathrooms in the building that were unoccupied. This would of course not include the one actually nearest to your office.
Now, back to what I was saying about a “refresher.” Perhaps, I meant an “air refresher” or is that an air freshener?
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Cranks My Tractor
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I'm BN Heard and I like semicolons, dogs and turning the lights off in the bathroom when someone from the other side of the building passes two restrooms to come use "ours" - yes, while they are in the stall.
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