Have you ever had a roommate who announces when they are pooping? I basically have had two. Its not exactly announcing it, but when you live with someone you tend to get to know their habits and notice way to many personal things, such as their propensity to eat your food when they are drunk or share your shampoo (two things I am very guilty of). But so far, I have lived with two very different roommates who have one habit I find really bizarre: turning on the faucet while they take the browns to the super bowl.

I guess the theory is this: they know they live in close proximity with other people, who I suppose if they were listening closely to what their roommates are doing in the bathroom, would be able to hear the gross noises that generally happen when human beings do their daily thing. Solution: turn on the faucet so everyone thinks you are doing something else that happens in the WC, such as washing your hands or manscaping or brushing your teeth.

The thing is, all of these actions do not make a steady, constant stream sound from the faucet. They make a water hitting the sink at a splashing interval sound. That in itself makes you wonder strange things like: is my roommate deaf? Did they pass out on the floor? Do they hate water conservation?

Hearing a steady stream of water for a few minutes once a day is strange in itself but isn't how I figured out what was really going on in there. It was mainly from having to live right outside a bathroom. I used to live in a dorm with three other guys and I had the unfortunate room right outside the communal bathroom. Which means every time someone was dropping the kids off at the pool, I had to quickly shut my door or I couldn't be in my own room for about 35-45 minutes. The sink and mirror that we all shared had no door to it; it was open to the rest of the room, but the toilet and shower obviously did, thus allowing people to use the sink when others were in the john or shower. I noticed, over time, that I had one roommate who would turn on the sink full bore, then go into the toilet for a solid 5-10 min, then come out and turn it off. Between the amount of time on the pot, and the silent but deadly aroma that would happen to waft into my dorm room, I put two and two together. If he was going in to just take a piss? The sink didn't come on.

Now I just assumed this guy was strange and it was just some personal issue he had. But now I have a current roommate who does the same thing. If I hear the faucet for a solid few min, and walk by the bano after, I know what just went down (I happen to live outside the girls bathroom in an employee dorm for the second time in my life, what luck!). What I find so ironic is that the very thing that is being done so people don't know they are shitting is the thing actually screams out to anyone within listening vicinity (which isn't very far, after all it is a dorm),'Guess what, I'm taking a dump!' I wonder if any of my other roommates know about it, but I think it might just be me because I realize I may have lived the life of a perfect storm of roommate bathroom habit detection (not my fault) for a few reasons: One, I lived in the dorms for 5 years (3 as a resident and 2 as an RA) and then I became a ski bum and now live in an employee dorm (noone in Aspen affords real housing, trust me, its not as strange as it sounds) and on three of those occasions my door was literally across the hall from the bathroom. Try living that close to a bathroom someone else uses daily and NOT noticing.

So, the next time your are standing outside my bathroom and the shower is on but you don't hear the water splashing on the floor at some random intervals, do the normal thing and just assume I’m probably masturbating.