[mistersquid]

> 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.

[rockercoaster]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.