The corner office has become the toilet office.

toilet office. From speaking on cordless phones at home to texting a colleague during a break at work, from updating your Facebook status at a family dinner to confirming a staff meeting during a date , the restroom, long home to the most private of human acts, has become less a place to powder your nose and more a place to work.

In August, a legal intern working for the defense team in a North Carolina murder trial was caught discussing the case over a cellphone in the restroom while jurors were present. The judge barred her from the courtroom. In July, Geveryl Robinson wrote in my hometown paper, The Savannah (Georgia) Morning News, about asking her 100-year-old grandmother what invention had most amazed her. The cellphone, her grandmother said. “I’m amazed that people talk while they’re on the toilet.

Are they the president of the United States?” And on a recent TV episode of “Entourage” on HBO, the superagent Ari Gold is forced by his therapist to go on a cellphone-free date with his wife when he spots a rival and is overcome with an urge to call her. He races to the restroom and reaches behind the toilet bowl, where his assistant has taped his BlackBerry.

The scene is an homage to an iconic moment in “The Godfather” in which Michael Corleone reaches behind a toilet in an Italian-American restaurant and retrieves a revolver, which he then uses to kill a rival. Now that working in the water closet has come out of the closet, people are trying to determine the rules for this new genre of social etiquette.

In recent weeks I’ve heard white-haired lawyers confess to the flush and run. I’ve heard teenagers correct them by saying, “That’s why God invented the mute button.” A newlywed admitted he pretends to go to the restroom at a restaurant when he’s really just checking his e-mail.

Richard Ling, a professor of sociology at the IT University of Copenhagen, studies the transition from old technologies to new. In his book, “New Tech, New Ties,” he argues that mobile phones and other devices actually improve society by strengthening bonds among family and friends.

Using a very private
place for social
interaction.

“A lot of our ideas about social interaction prioritize face-to-face interaction,” he said. “But mediated interaction can also enhance human connections.” If I slip into the boys’ room at a dinner party to text my wife that I’ll be late or to check whether my daughter has returned from the movies, Dr. Ling said, I deserve credit for not disrupting my hosts’ dinner party, while also reinforcing my own family ties. Dr. Ling said the message is clear: connectivity is more impo

rtant to people these days than decorum. Reaching out is more valued than outmoded standards of where we reach out from. In many ways, the anxiety surrounding cellphone conduct mirrors the period of a century ago when the telephone was becoming widely adopted. Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940,” said that telephone companies originally discouraged people from using the phone for social conversations at all.

“What happens in periods of large social change is that people adapt the new technology to fit their priorities,” Dr. Fischer said. With the telephone, far from destroying social cohesion, the public believed the telephone was advancing it. “A similar transition is under way today,” he said. Michael T. Sykes, of the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute in California, started a Web site called the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette in 1995.

He said rules governing telephone use are one of the top questions on his site. “In public restrooms, I’m 100 percent against talking on the phone,” he said. “Short of your wife going into labor, there’s really no good reason to be answering the phone in a public bathroom.

Bathroom etiquette is about other people, and nobody wants to listen to your phone conversation.” At home, however, he supports the custom, as long as your interlocutor doesn’t know or isn’t offended. “I wouldn’t recommend speaking to your grandmother, but your brother or buddy, why not? If in doubt, don’t flush while you’re talking."


BRUCE FEILER / ESSAY