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Best way to conceal Incontinence Products at work?
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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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.
I still disagree not true as a standard.
It may not be true as a standard of operations, but it happens enough that employees have to be (and largely are) aware of the possibility.
I have a funny story that ties incontinence at work and dastardly corporate shenanigans together: I’ve worked from home full time since 2019, and most of the time since 2006. This year, my employer (over 50K employees nationally) dictated everyone had to return to working in the office full time, rolling back the clock to my first days as a new employee 20 years ago.
I decided to put in for an ADA exemption based on my chronic incontinence, which was 100% at the time, because all our restrooms at work, while they have stalls, don’t have private sinks, so any cleanup I’d have to do would potentially be seen by others coming and going to the restrooms (“Don’t mind me, Steve, I’m just washing my testicles…that was some meeting, huh?”).
To get the exemption, I had to submit a very detailed write-up as to why I needed it and how it would benefit the company, and why a “reasonable” accommodation wouldn’t work for me.
I got it put together, kicked it around for a couple of days because I was laying my health issues out there for all in HR to see, then submitted it via the employee HR online portal, with an automated reply that someone would review it and be in touch with me within 48 hours, something like that.
What did I get not 15 minutes later? An email from our Infrastructure division, the ones managing the return to office (assigning cubicles and all that) saying that they’d reviewed the distance between my house and my office and determined I lived too far away, so I was granted an indefinite exemption to continue working from home.
Detailing my filthy incontinence issues (and really leaning into them) for all of HR to read and giggle over (and you know they were!) was all for naught!
At this point, though, I’m just hoping they do read them and offer me a decent severance to take me dirty bladder habits elsewhere! 😆