Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Hey, Sniff This
Today is the third in a week’s worth of posts about my workspace in some damn way or other. As with all these posts, I will conclude with a random amusing business name from somewhere in Richmond or Albany, California.
If you work, as I do, in a hivelike edifice of stacked cubes, sealed windows and recirculated air, you’ve smelled it too. All you want to do is finish reading one more clumsy proposal, or fulfilling one more undodgeable demand, or just to sit and quietly surf the gently lapping margins of the datapool surrounding us, and suddenly it invades, distracting you, pushing inappropriate buttons, confusing your bioclock. Just when you least want or expect to smell food, it is all up in your face and down your nostrils and into your hapless mind. It’s not like you have any choice, you’re locked into your scene for the duration. You must endure the indignity, if not the nausea-inducing olfactory insult, of smelling food at work, where it ought not be smelled. These are the Inappropriate Food Smells, or IFSs.
The classic example is the hallway outside the coffee room that seems to be permanently scented with popcorn butt’r, that syntho-oleageneous goop that turns a healthy snack into paper sack full of coronary thrombosi. There’s the elevator that reeks of someone’s onion-garlic curry leftovers, or worse, of someone’s breath or other bodily emanations resulting therefrom. And of course, the odor of a big meaty cheeseburger-n-fries being consumed by the selfish carnivore in the next cube over, too industrious to eat lunch away from the desk, too lazy to have bothered to bring you a burger too. These IFSs are pretty standard fare, hardly worth bitching about to your fellow zombies, much less worthy of precious blog space.
Then, there are my IFSs. By their nature, by the very fact of being mine, rather than yours, they are inherently profound and fascinating. They disrupt my serenity and confound my metabolism. They disgust me when I should be building up an appetite, and when I really don’t want to be thinking of food they rack me with longing. They even have the audacity to create entirely unwelcome associations in my mind between food and non-food-related activities and places. I know I can’t exorcise these IFSs by “outing” them here, as you might do with a song you can’t stop thinking of till you pass it on to someone else. No, these dyschronous gustatolfactions are going to continue to haunt my workworld no matter how I whine about them. But I’m in a sharing mood so you’re going to hear all about it anyway.
Cinnamon Roll Alley: My building is on the corner of a block mostly comprised of mid-rise office buildings, with small commercial and retail spaces on the ground level and pedestrian walkways cutting between and among them. I reach the front door of my building on such a walkway each morning. One of the other buildings backing onto my walkway has a bakery on the ground floor, and a few times each week I can smell in the crisp morning air as I stride purposefully toward my office, that the bakery is cooking up cinnamon rolls.
Oh yeah. Thickly seasoned yeasty goodness hangs heavily in the air, nearly a tangible presence. It’s all I can do not to raid the bakery on such mornings and consume leavened treats till I rupture something, but it’s no good if I restrain myself either: deny myself pastry, and I fixate on it all day; eat a pastry, and I get a nice restful sugar crash at midmorning that leaves me ready for all manner of clumsy oversights and vacant staring into space. Once I’ve smelled the cinnamon rolls in that alley before work, I’m done for. The only partly-effective alternative is eating an oat cake, one of those tan lumpy hockeypucks seemingly made of compressed breakfast cereal and dried apricots, lightly sweetened and heavy as pigiron. And even then, I’m somewhat resentful of myself for depriving myself of one of those sugar-frosted cranberry-orange breakfast buns. This does not even begin to address the problem of the numerous batches of cookies that this cursed pit of glucose and starch bakes each afternoon. I am beginning to consider working in proximity to this establishment as an occupational hazard.
Mystery Meat: This one comes up around my workspace itself - my cube and the neighboring cubes, and the hallways and bullpens and window-hoarding offices among which I work. We’re on the opposite side of the building from the coffee kitchens; none of the windows in the building can be opened; there is a coffee shop five stories below us but we never catch so much as a whiff of their arabica and scones. What we do sometimes smell, however, wafting around our tidy geometrically-aligned workstations, is lasagne. Or maybe chili? Perhaps a tomato-drenched yankee pot roast. Something meaty, certainly, drooling thick juices, redolent of cumin and pepper. Like, for example, a stew. And the thing that’s inexplicable about it is, whenever we catch a whiff of this smell, no one is ever eating anything that would smell anything like this anywhere near us. No one is tucking into a big meatloaf sandwich at her plain beige desk, or is secretly scarfing a takeout tub of beef wellington and kidney pie. We’re all sniffing around for the phantom manwich, but it can’t be found.
This is usually around 11 am - too early for a lunch break. I’m still blotting up crumbs of sugar from my ilicit cinnamon roll, with attendant energy spikes and valleys, and suddenly I’m assaulted by the savory perfume of what might be redeye gravy over chickenfried steak. One part of me wants to want it, suddenly wants it to be seven at night so I can have a beer and a big slice of the brisket I think I can smell. But a more coherent part of me realizes that I’m not even hungry, and certainly not for whatever the hell it is I think I’m smelling. If it were placed before me, a tiny wise part of me knows I wouldn’t even try a taste of it. It is emphatically what I don’t want, it arouses dyspepsia. Yet when any of us catch a whiff of it, we are compelled to seek it out. We all wander about looking for it and then, disappointed and a little disgusted, we give up and go back to our desks, a sour scent in our nostrils and a vague disquiet in our bellies. In ten minutes it’s gone. It’s like the ghost of a lunch that time forgot. Well, you know what, Ghost Lunch? We get it, buddy. It’s okay. You can move on now. The pickles will forgive you.
Cinnamon Can: You know the smell of the bathroom where you work? Ours was always a standard, unobtrusive, ersatz-fresh pine-sol-esque scent, the standard smell of antisceptic tiled floors and vitreous porcelain in a private-public setting. But now there’s new equipment in the bathrooms, and the old cleanser smell is gone. The new equipment is a white plastic box that sits high up on a wall and spits out a squirt of scent every so often - cinnamon, in our case. It’s like the whole bathroom is chewing a giant stick of Big Red. You walk in and instantly get a double nostrilfull of eau de red hot.
Considering some of the other smells I’ve encountered in that dour little room, I am not going to complain about a fresh, spicy scent in the bathroom. But it’s disconcerting. I like cinnamon candy - atomic fireballs, Jolly Rancher fire stix, all that good tongue-burning action. Cinnamon is an odor I have, for years, associated with mouthwatering tasty goodness. But now, it’s being re-associated with other bodily reactions and responses. It’s Pavlov run amok, and in the bathroom at work, no less. And I’m not really comfortable with the results of this experiment. It’s one thing for your mouth to water when you unwrap a piece of capsicum candy. It’s another altogether to have the same response to proximity to some of modern plumbing’s more familiar fixtures.
Anyway, I guess it’s better than chewing gum that tastes like the bathroom at work smells.
Random business name from the Richmond-Albany corridor: Golden Gate Palms and Exotics.
