The struggles of living with a bathroom hogger

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Sharing a bathroom with a family of five is a constant battle between thinning patience and borderline insanity. 

Imagine waking up on weekdays at 5:00 am just to beat everyone to the bathroom, but your classes don’t actually start until 10:00 am. On the weekends when you let yourself sleep in, you wake up to people screaming their names, calling “dibs” on who’s next in the line-up. 

There’s no hope for a morning routine anymore because you won’t get inside the bathroom until lunch. 

When your bladder is screaming for release, someone will already be in the bathroom taking their sweet time. You’ve just got to hold everything in— your pee, your patience, and your inner peace. 

But sometimes you just lose it. 

I mean, how and why would a regular person spend hours, three times a day inside the bathroom? Do you have diarrhea everyday? Are you cleaning to make everything spotless? Is there a magic wardrobe that takes you to another world? I’d never know because I’d miss it. 

The most annoying part is the perfect timing. A bathroom hogger will only go when you need it more. It’s like a sixth sense to use the bathroom at the worst possible times.  

That being said, I realized it’s not the end of the world to have a bathroom hogger in the house. Frustrations will get you nowhere, and the only thing you can do to solve it is to be creative with it.  

I started with an intervention. We sat down, had a good conversation, and made compromises. It lasted a week, before the hour or hours’ long showers started again. 

I banged on the door, twisted the doorknob, and screamed my frustrations. It’s perfect in the mornings to let all the stress out and start plotting another plan because there’s only a 50/50 chance he heard anything at all over his own voice singing in the shower.   

I opted for revenge-seeking techniques which require more patience but yield better results. The key is to take note of the usual times he goes to the bathroom, beat him to it, and take as much time as you need. 

Take his towel with you on the way out or switch his shampoo with a vibrant blue dye mixed with a super sticky glue for added measure. The more frantic he gets, the faster he’ll be out of the bathroom. This worked wonders because he didn’t spend much time in the bathroom anymore for very long, except when he needed to wash all the “blues” away. 

If you tried everything and nothing worked, find the main water switch of the whole house and turn it off when he’s inside the bathroom again. Switch it back on if and only if he agrees not to hog the bathroom ever again.

If your roommate still does not agree, maybe it’s time to find a new place, buy your own porta-potty, or dig a hole.