Best way to conceal Incontinence Products at work?

Posted by jayhall @jayhall, 3 days ago

I work in a large building and we have two large central bathrooms. We don't have any private bathrooms anywhere and we have no lockable private bathrooms. Occasionally my leakage gets to the point that I need a thin pad. I have a cache of thin pads locked in my one and only private cabinets. I have a small cloth bag that I put my pads in along with some " Dude wipes", etc. Almost every time I have leakage and I go to put a pad in either on the way to the bathroom or on my way out someone notices my little bag and either gives me a look, or worse asks me what's in the bag. I usually tell them "personal items" and walk away. I'm getting tired of being asked etc. I can't take my backpack in there cause that would be even worse. I don't have a Murse or man bag. I thought the little cloth bag would not be noticed but apparently I'm the topic of some conversations about what's in my little cloth bag. If you take pads, etc to work how do you transport them to the bathroom? I can not put one in my underwear in my office. I have a huge glass door. I also don't want to put one in my underwear everyday and waste them. Suggestions?

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TurtBean | @turtbean | 2 hours ago

I can also cite several examples, ones I have personal experience with.

Three at my wife’s last employer (before she went into business for herself). All three let go after they came back from FMLA leave. One was my wife (stroke), their consistent “top performer.” She knew it was going to happen, because she’d seen it happen to the other two.

It happened twice at my previous employer. One woman got pregnant with triplets, and when she came back, the company owner had “reorganized” and eliminated her position, so he slotted her into a do-nothing pretend job that had nothing to do with her skill set, and then fired her for underperforming a few months later.

I sat in the meeting where the same owner verbally ok’d an employee to work from home while he had both knees replaced (one after the other, and this was before Covid, when WFH wasn’t common) and a few weeks after his first surgery, publicly berated the employee for abandoning the office, told him, “Be back at your desk tomorrow or I’ll consider your absence your resignation,” and terminated him.

That’s five, and I know of others, plus of things that are illegal to ask in interviews that get asked and considered anyway.

Sure, a person can go to a lawyer and go up against billion-dollar companies with entire legal departments built around getting out of these things, but most people don’t have the money or the staying power to do so. We actually went to a local attorney when my wife was let go, who advised to just move on with her life, as these cases are virtually impossible to prove.

We all wish life were like the TV legal dramas show it, with the little guy scoring a multimillion dollar judgment against the sinister corporate overlords, but it just isn’t the case most days.