5 Fun Ways to Annoy the Person in the Next Bathroom Stall
Somewhere in a Wendy’s right now, two grown adults are sitting eighteen inches apart with their pants around their ankles, both pretending the other one does not exist.
That mutual lie is the load-bearing wall of American civilization.
The fun ways to annoy the person in the next bathroom stall all work by kicking that wall until something gives.
The five that land: narrate your own visit, borrow something insane, take a phone call that is not happening, mirror the poor bastard, and mail him a small object under the partition.
No cantaloupe required. The internet has spent twenty years telling you to smuggle a melon into an Applebee’s, and somebody finally has to say something about that.
Why the person in the next bathroom stall is so easy to annoy
The gap under the partition is not a construction error.
Accessible stalls are required to leave nine inches of toe clearance above the finished floor, which makes your ankles federally mandated public property.
The walls are cheap on purpose too.
Flimsy stall partitions get defended precisely because they offer no privacy. Somebody said that out loud in a meeting once and other adults nodded.
Americans hate it and have said so with numbers. Bradley Corporation found that 40% of adults make for the stall farthest from the door and 35% get annoyed when someone takes the one beside theirs.
Those two numbers together are a gift.
Most of the country walks into a restroom already running a defensive formation. Which means picking the middle stall in an empty six-stall bathroom is not an accident to these people.
It is an act of war.
And he cannot fight back. He cannot leave, his pants have him hobbled at the ankles, and his whole strategy has collapsed.
This is the most defenseless a stranger will ever be in your presence without a hospital getting involved.
1. Narrate your own visit like a golf announcer
Do not yell. Yelling is for amateurs and college freshmen.
The move is the hushed, reverent, borderline loving voice of a man calling the back nine at Augusta.
“He’s got a tricky lie here.” Long pause. “Wind’s picking up.” Longer pause. “Ohhh. He is not going to like that one bit.”
Every list on this topic tells you to bring props. Cream corn. Marbles. A flask of Mountain Dew. A honeydew you drop from six feet like a maniac.
Props are a bad strategy, and the numbers back that up.
Among people who bring a phone in with them, 37.3% sit there longer than five minutes, against 7.1% of the people who leave the phone alone.
Five minutes is longer than most first dates last before somebody mentions an ex.
A melon gag lasts four seconds. Then you are just a guy standing in a bathroom holding fruit, and the moment has passed for everyone.
Go with the broadcast. Renewable, sustainable, no equipment, and it scales beautifully into overtime.
2. Borrow something that has no business being in there
Slide your open hand under the divider, palm up, and ask the man if he has a stapler.
Not a gag item, not a bit. An actual stapler, from an actual desk.
The single most boring object in the American workplace, requested with total sincerity by a stranger who is mid-evacuation at a Buffalo Wild Wings on a Tuesday.
He will say no, and he will remember you until the day he dies.
3. Take a phone call that is not happening
Three quarters of Americans cop to using a phone in the bathroom, and 63% have taken a real call while sitting on a toilet.
His brain has been trained to file stall phone calls under normal.
That trained reflex is the mistake, and you are about to walk straight through the middle of it.
Answer nothing. Say hello anyway. Then escalate:
- “No, no, I can talk. I’m free.”
- “Tell him the money is clean.”
- “Because the vet said no more, Deborah. He said no more.”
- “How much of the boat did they find?”
- Silence. Then, very quietly: “Put my other brother on.”
He only hears half of this. His imagination fills in the rest, and his imagination is significantly worse than anything you could write.
Then he will wash his hands for the nationally observed six seconds.
On the drive home he will think about your other brother. He will think about him again on Saturday, at his kid’s soccer game, in the rain.
By Thursday he will have decided he misheard it, and Thursday will be lying to him.
4. Become his reflection
Whatever he does, you do it back on a half-second delay, forever.
He shifts, you shift. He coughs, you cough. He sighs the sigh of a man reconsidering the shrimp, and you sigh it right back with feeling.
Japan solved this exact anxiety with hardware.
Toto built a box that plays a fake flushing sound so women would quit wasting water flushing over and over to cover their own noise. It has sold half a million units since 1988.
An entire nation built a machine so that nobody would ever have to hear you.
The American version of that technology is a stranger performing a live impression of you from twelve inches away, with commitment, for free.
Then land the flush together. Nothing on this earth is worse than a synchronized flush.
5. Send one small object under the wall and never explain it
Every version of this bit online involves peanut butter, and every version of this bit online was written by somebody who has never cleaned anything.
Peanut butter is a crime scene, and somebody underpaid has to come mop it up.
What you want is the opposite of that. Something clean, mundane, and impossible to interpret.
One AAA battery. A hotel key card from a city he has never visited. A single mint. A business card with the name scratched off.
Then say nothing.
Not one word, no matter what he asks, all the way to the sink and out the door and into the parking lot.
The old classic is a hand creeping along the floor, but 74% of people already peek under the door to see if a stall is taken. Movement down there barely registers.
An unexplained battery is a haunting that follows a man into his fifties.
He will describe that battery to people at parties for the rest of his life, and not one of them will believe him.
Rules of engagement, because you are not a monster
Roughly 57% of adults will skip drinking liquids before they leave the house, purely to avoid ever setting foot in a public restroom.
Now add the 7% or so of the population with paruresis, a real diagnosis where the body flatly refuses to perform while anybody else is in the room.
Half that room is already having the worst ten minutes of its day. So aim it properly:
- Nothing crosses the wall but sound and small dry objects. Wet is assault. Weird is comedy.
- No cameras, no phones over the top, no peeking, not for a second, not as a joke. That is a felony and a mugshot taken in your work polo.
- If it sounds medical or genuinely bad over there, kill the bit and be a person about it.
- Never at work.
- Airports are the promised land, because nobody there will ever see you again and everybody there has already given up.
Kids in the room ends it immediately.
A four-year-old will repeat “put my other brother on” to a preschool teacher, and you will be long gone, but that woman will carry it for years.
Go buy the battery
A four-pack runs about four bucks at any gas station in America and you only need the one.
Keep the other three in the glovebox. The middle stall in an empty bathroom does not announce itself.
