baby bumpOut of all the reasons to potentially lose your job, I'm sure you never thought going to the bathroom would get you canned, right? (No pun intended on the can thing.)

Well, that's exactly what happened to one pregnant woman in Kansas City. April Roller was fired because she took too many bathroom breaks -- even though any employer with half a brain should know that pregnant women have to pee pretty much every 10 minutes or so. (Or at least I went about that often.)

Get this one -- the company apparently considers bathroom breaks to be a "privilege," and they didn't think it was fair to April's co-workers that she got to use the facilities more often than they did. (Somehow I'm guessing they weren't as bothered by it.)

And it wasn't just the peeing that got on her employer's nerves, because April was also given her very own trash can to keep under her desk for sudden bouts of morning sickness. (WTF?)

Not surprisingly, she's suing the call center she worked at for unlawful termination. If there is any justice in this world, the judge will rule in her favor and give her a fat wad of money so she can sit at home and use her own bathroom as often as she damn well pleases in the future. 

I mean, can you even believe this case actually exists? You have to be pretty ballsy to tell a pregnant woman when she can and can't pee, and where and when she's permitted to puke. (It's a good thing Kate Middleton doesn't work there.)

I've always been a pretty frequent "pee-er" as it is, but when I was pregnant with my son, trips to the bathroom were definitely made a few times each hour. It didn't even matter how much or how little I'd had to drink at any given point during the day -- I had to pee ALL THE TIME.

I was up and down from my desk and running down the hall to the ladies room all day every day, and not once did my employer say one word to me about it. And if they had? Well, I'm sure I would've dropped a few choice terms in their direction before bursting into tears in the hopes of squeezing a little bit of sympathy out of them.

And if I'd been fired for peeing? Yeah, I'd have filed a lawsuit too, and I probably would've kicked things up a notch and gotten some sort of written statement from a judge saying my next employer had to provide me with my own, private bathroom. (Ok, not really. But wouldn't that be cool?)

It's just so sad that some companies haven't figured out that when you are pregnant, there are bodily functions you really can't control, and that they need to cut their expectant workers a little slack. Is that really too much to ask?

Has your employer given you a hard time about bathroom breaks during your pregnancy?

 

Image via cscott2006/Flickr