office scent-sibilities
The design studio where I work is a dark place. It is literally in the far corner of the second floor of the Harrah's Entertainment building, as if an exile or banishment. Everyone I've talked to downstairs in the cafe calls it, "Oh, that cramped, dark room in the far corner?" To some, it is a rather claustrophobic situation, where pushing back your chair means bumping into the next person, and every time Guy B gets up, he can't seem to do it without bumping his foot or himself into the back of my chair.I am not claustrophobic, I can deal with dark spaces, and have at one time or another spelunked into a 150 foot cave with merely a rope and harness (and a few pieces of essential metal) and sloshed around in mud and water among the bats that I could only smell and feel with my hands and face. I am rather scent-sitive, and in the dark of a cave, there's nothing more distinct than the odor of bat poop and the cold, dry-dirt smell of clay and slowly dripping water that form stalagmites and stalactites over the course of hundreds of years. Stories depict blind people with a finely tuned sense of hearing, as blind bats are attuned to the sound of their own screeching bouncing off cave walls allowing them to sense the distance before crashing. Well, my poor eyesight makes me deafer than a doorknob, but seems to make my nose more keen than I'd like.
Being in close quarters arouses or completely makes my olfactory shrivel with horror. Guy A smells like what the fresh Zest commercial I imagine would smell like but doesn't in real life, and if smell-o-rama were ever fully developed it would be pleasant, green, grassily fresh, like an Irish spring. Girl A smokes and prefers a heady, heavy perfume reminiscent to me of women in Paris that frequent dark, smoky bars that never see the light of day. When she walks around, she exudes a smokey fuzz of cigarettes and flowers around her body, stirring the air and slightly lifting random pieces of paper off desks as she passes. Girl B smells fruity, like a bath bomb concoction conceived at Bath and Bodyworks, lifting melon, cucumber, and berry notes and placing them into some frivolous gel-y spray, with colorful beads, overpowered by that rubbing alcohol scent. Guy B, fortunately for me, has no scent and if I were a hound in search of prey, I'd never find him in the small dark space of the studio. Guy D--nevermind Guy D because he managed to assult my nostrils by mid-day the few times that I had to sit near his desk - thank goodness I don't have to anymore. As for the rest, they're mostly swathed in a hazy blur of cigarettes and coffee. Sometimes I wish I could open a window and let some sunlight and fresh air in.
6:29 AM | |
