80% of the my poops are quick and fast, sit, poop and wipe and done. I noticed that the odd 20% chance I usually get stuck in what I like to call the ghost poop zone where you're not sure if there are anymore fecal matter in your rectum. So you just sit there, waiting and waiting ... sometimes more poop will follow but other times no goods are delivered. Usually I see an increase in time for a factor anywhere from 2x to even 15x the time it usually takes for me to take a dump. This has annoyed me for a great while so I wanted to start investigating its effect on my time and ultimately its cause.

So I decided to take some measurements starting from about 2-3 weeks ago. For any poop that I considered normal, I measured the time it takes between me sitting on the seat until the time I finish. I called this measure Time Until Wipe because I stop the timer right as I reach for the toilet paper. This measure was chosen because I found that there was significant variance in the time I took to wipe, which are all greatly affected by factors relating to the actual content and size of the feces and its traces that remain in my colon rather than the duration of the #2. Therefore, I had to eliminate those factors from the actual calculation.

For regular poops, on average, it's about 34 seconds with a stdev of about 4.2s (see below)

Below are my ghost poop results (I was only able to document 16 concrete occurrences) and it's clear that I have a statistically significant increase in overall poop time due to this.

Looking at the dates of all my documented poops, I noticed that there's no explicit trend, some happen on random days. Some even happen on days I have a lot of normal poop. Going forward, I will be experimenting with a variety of control variables and measuring its outcome. This ranges from anywhere between diet, time of day, posture (am i leaning forward or up right) and the consistency of the feces. I will get to the bottom of this and eradicate future ghost poops. I am estimating through my model a total saving of about 10-12 hours annually. If it's true that time = money then I should be saving about $500 a year.

Anyone else have this happen? If so, please share your experiences. I'd be interested in hearing your theories and documented results.

And as always, AMA.

**This thread was edited on Dec 27th 2018 at 2:45:39pm