My co-worker is a woman with incredible BO. I’m talking Seinfeld BBO (Beyond BO). She stinks very badly and I’m not sure what to do about it.
Some background. She’s in her 30’s, and European. She and I must work closely together almost daily. I had a lunch meeting with her today, and I had to get up and leave, because I thought I was going to throw up.
I’ve never been in a situation like this. Is there anyone out there that can tell me what I can do legally? I wouldn’t want to do something to jeopardize my career. I don’t want to get dragged into HR to be told how insensitive I am, or how I need to accept other cultures. I accept other cultures, just not one growing under a co-worker’s armpit.
Any advice? I am going to lose my lunch for sure. Great for my diet. Bad for a working relationship.
I once worked with a guy with the most incredibly rank b.o. you’ve ever experienced. He smelled like he rolled around in dead fish and packed his pits with the guts before coming to work all neatly pressed and tidy each day. Our office was approximately 8’x14’ with one door and no cross ventilation. I was miserable.
After weeks of these, I could stand it anymore and mentioned something to my supervisor who promised to handle it. The next day, my co-worker apologized for his b.o., saying he’d battled it all of his life and just couldn’t cure it. I was embarrassed, he was embarrassed and the problem didn’t go away until he was moved to a different department.
Similar problem here. There’s a lady who works here who weighs about 300 lbs. I’m in no way implying that all overweight people have BO, btw. Anyway, it’s truly a personal hygeine issue. The clothes she wears are nice, but they are obviously stained with food droppings. (She’s vision impaired to boot). I think she’s just too lazy to bathe. She goes thru periods where she is clean, but now she’s in a funk phase.
I can assure you there’s nothing “European” about BO, other than that that continent, too, has unhygienic assholes who don’t bathe. You can’t pinpoint it to a specific country, though. More BO in the Mediteranean countries, but then, it’s warmer there. Food is an influence in how people smell in general (think garlic and France), but that does not equal BO.
The OP’s colleague smells, but not because of her culture, wherever she’s from.
Why mention her weight? It would have been just as relevant as the color of her hair. Women who weigh 300 pounds can still take showers. (I know. I used to weigh 300 pounds and lost 150 of it. Now when I’m tempted to call someone “lazy” I think about strapping a 75 lb. sack of feed to my front and a 75 lb. sack of feed to my backside and remember what it felt like to walk.)[/hijack]
She has a lot of the symptoms of depression – a very real illness.
Nevertheless, neither you nor the OP should have to endure the bad odors. I had a student once who had such an odor that when she came to my desk, I could “taste” her from the air. (I sent her to the guidance counselor with a stapled note and told her to wait for an answer.)
If you are the same sex or a friend, I would be straight with her. If there is someone on more friendly terms with her, ask her or him to level with her. Yes, it will hurt her feelings, but it is something that she needs to know. Just be as tactful as possible.
Also, someone who understands depression might want to talk with her.
I remember when I first started at the company I’m at now, we had a department lunch meeting where the director of HR came down and did a little presentation for us about how to handle problem coworkers. She made a point of saying that the handling of offensive odors were part of their job.
Interestingly enough, a coworker of mine who had horrible BO stopped having that problem a few days later.
I suggest you go to HR. If it’s making you feel physically ill, you have every right to ask them to do something about it.
<HR Hat On> This is absolutely a problem for HR to deal with. It’s not a pleasant duty, but chances are that your HR staff has a prepared “script” for how to deal with employees who have these types of touchy issues. Letting HR handle it also insulates you from becoming a target for confrontation if the person with the problem lets their embarrassment turn into anger.
Even before I started work at a new job (not my current job) my boss-to-be (male, age 66) informed me that the medication he had to take for a medical condition had BO as a side effect.
Whether this could possibly be the case with your co-worker, I don’t know. But it’s another possibility, that she has a medical condition that causes this BO that no deodorant can mask effectively.
Agreed; it is essential to let the HR department deal with it, they have the knowledge and responsibility; there are just too many ways in which it could turn nasty and end up making you look very bad if you try to deal with it yourself. Be careful not to phrase your dialogue with HR in such a way as to make you sound mean or whiny; state the bare facts in a concerned, professional manner.
Oh, and don’t be drawn into speculation - unlikely that they would, but if your HR contact asks “What do you think is the cause of this person’s BO?”, your best bet is to answer something like “I honestly don’t know, I just know that he/she does have BO”
Jump the gun much?
SFP, one thing to bear in mind is that there may be no fix for this. You could go to HR and they talk with this person etc, and there is simply nothing at all they can do. Might still be worth talking to HR, but it’s something to bear in mind.
Either way, I can only sympathise, we had a teacher in highschool who had some sort of problem, I couldn’t imagine what. In this case it was not merely a smell, but a true vapour. Poor woman, and working with teenagers to boot! Thankfully I didn’t have any classes with this teacher, since we are talking about an odour that one could recognise from the stinging sensation in your eyes if you went into a room or corridor that she had been in within the past few hours.
I think the weight does matter. You seem to draw the wrong conclusions however. It’s not that I am of the opinion that people who weigh 300 pounds can’t take showers. On the contrary I am pretty sure that most people weighing 300+ pounds are taking showers more frequently than I do.
Yet, you can’t argue that people who have to move an additional weight of a hundred or more pounds are more likely to break a sweat than a person who weighs less. Furthermore sweat can accumulate in folds of skin.
Therefore - while people who are overweight can and probably do shower more than “thinner” people - they are still more likely to be plagued by BO through no real fault of their own.
I hope you understand that it’s not malice speaking here; I just wanted to point out that factors such as weight might have something to do with smell after all.
I have a related question: can dreadlocks contribute significantly to a BO problem? The foulest smelling person I’ve ever been around also had huge dreadlocks, and I suspected them of being the stinky culprit, but I never was sure. And I’ve been around nonsmelly dreads before.
Since she was training me to replace her in the job she’d been fired from, we didn’t exactly have a close working relationship; fortunately, I only had to be in the same room with her for one day, after which she ignored me for the rest of her time at that company. But still – phew!
Unwashed hair can contribute to BO, but dreadlocks as usually worn in America don’t tend to be unwashed. It can help to not wash ones hair when trying initially to get it to lock, but once locked, the normal practice is to wash it as usual. I have had many co-workers with various styles of dreadlocked and none of them had bo. Not enven the white guy whose hair really looked as if it had not been washed in recent memory.
Conversely, there is a couple in my church (from the Caribbean) who both sport dreadlocks and there is a distinct odor to them. It’s not so unpleasant that people flee from their presence, but it’s unmistakably there and absolutely emanates from their heads. A relative of theirs (who recently shed her own dreads) put it to me thusly: there are different ways of setting locks; some of the products or choices are supposed to be “all natural” but as a part of that natural state, they can go “rancid” (for lack of a better term) if left in the hair for too long, which can then lead to a bit of nastiness.