I wonder what the oldest reference is we can find to this practice. I bet it's very old. Oldest I know of is only the late 19th century, but I bet we could beat that by at least several hundred years. Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?
Small aside someone might find interesting. Hopefully not offtopic. In Catalonia there used to be a thriving textile industry. Workers would work on a garment and fold it when it was time to go home, to unfold it the next day and resume work. That action (to fold) is in Catalan plegar. Still today people use that verb to mean being done with work today. "Quan plegues?" meaning when do you finish work, for example.
> Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?
Doubtful because the concept of clocking and clocking out is an artifact of the shift from mercantilism to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution where people sold their time in exchange for money.
Before that, in Elizabethan England, people were not free agents but subjects of British Empire. Merchants could control their destinies to some extent but did not exchange their labor so much as accumulated wealth through trade. They did not clock in and out.
So, there was not company time vs. personal time. There was just time and people conducted their bowel functions in outhouses and chamber pots befitting their stations.
The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.
Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.
> The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.
That's not why you poop on company time. Rather, because a) you get paid for it, b) the company pays for water and hygienic products you use up in the process.
I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).
Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:
> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.
Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.
