Not really. If you look at my post about the smelly guy in my unit, we were forced to take action once. During a field exercise we had to live in a tent with this guy for several weeks. Showers were provided, but he just wouldn’t take one. Until we kicked his ass. Yeah, it might seem mean for six guys to beat up one smelly moron, but his funk counted as another 2 guys so it was almost even.
Right- just leave him a nicely worded anon note. I have done this, and it helped.
Or have the ventilation upgraded in his office, or install some super-strong air filtration, or wear activated charcoal underwear, or buy Tiger Balm for all his colleagues, or whatever.
Even if the funk can’t be eliminated, this is the 21st century, and there are reek-mitigation measures available.
He doesn’t happen to a fan of Phish, does he? Those guys always tend to smell bad. White guys with dreadlocks also always seem to smell terrible. I work at a restaurant right in the center of the “hip” area of town and there are always hipsters and hippies around who sometimes come into our restaurant.
The former, I like because they usually leave huge tips and are extremely friendly. The latter are also often friendly, and also often leave huge tips (maybe because I’m young, have longer hair and a beard, so they figure me for one of them - whereas in truth I’m actually a Midwestern lo-fi rocker guy and there is a big difference, namely that I listen to music that doesn’t suck, and there aren’t frat guys mixed in with the hippies at the shows that I go to.)
Most of these so-called hippies are really just Joe College frat-types who happen to smoke weed and listen to Phish in addition to going to frat parties, and the dreads and whatnot seem to be just an affectation. But some of them are the real deal. These are the guys that ride in on vintage road bikes with ram’s-horn handlebars, wear wool caps and shirts with eco-related stuff on them, talk about local record stores, and ask if the lamb that we serve is free-range or not. I like these guys - but they often smell horrible. Like, a strong B-O smell that you smell as soon as they walk through the door, and which lingers even after they leave. What the fuck? You can be environmentally conscious and in touch with the universe and in a cosmic groove or whatever the fuck, and still take showers. Jesus Christ! What universe are these guys living in? Do they not realize how bad they smell? Do they know, and not care? If it’s the latter, then they’re being assholes.
That was a great OP!
We have a lady in our office that reaks pretty bad. I am sure it is a lack of personal hygene. My co-workers and I do our best to avoid her.
If the inside of her van is even a hint of what the inside of her house looks like we are convinced she is just a lazy slob.
About once a month she parks right next to the smoking area and you can see into her van. There is garbage all over it. And I am not talking about an empty McDonalds bag or two or a couple empty pop cans. I mean layers of garbage and food.
It looks like she and her children just throw anything they happen to be eating on the floor or the seats of the van. We have seen half eaten soft pretzels, grilled cheese sandwiches, large chip bags with chips spilling out. None of this is cleaned, ever. It just gets stepped on and smashed down for the next layer to be created. We witnessed what looked like a half eaten slice of Kraft cheese stuck to the back of the drivers seat for months. It must have finally dried enough to fall and become part of the layers of filth.
She also seems to have a craving for BBQ pork rinds but she never actually eats them. As of the last count there were five unopened bags laying in various places. I am sure they will be eventually stomped on and ground into their own pork rind layer.
I can’t even imagine what it smells like in there after a hot day sitting in the parking lot with all the windows rolled up.
Her old car was just as bad. The garbage and food had created layers that filled up the back floor board all the way to the seats. The seats themselves were also covered with caked on food and one of the back windows was smeared with what looked like mustard. It remained that way for months and months with out a cleaning. I guess her kid decided he wanted to fingerpaint with the mustard from his half eaten hotdog and decided the window would be a good place. We were not even sure how she drove that car as the garbage had collected around the gas and brake pedal.
She has only owned the van for a little over a year and we have watched it slowly degrade. It is sort of like the freak show at a carnival. You know what to expect and it is kind of sickening but you just can’t help looking.
Heh. Fair enough.
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I know its kind of a european thing not to bathe as much as Americans do, but this guy took the funk prize and ran with it.
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Actually, most Europeans that I know are hygienic and shower regularly. This guy is not part of the norm. Funky people are everywhere.
Same time of moons ago, I worked in a garden center/tree nursery. Our manager had the same problem – he’d shower before he came to work, hit himself with hose-water whenever he was able, and when he went home, he’d immediately go into the shower before he even greeted his wife. Nothing helped. Nice guy, too. Very aware of what the problem was, but sweet FA he could do about it. Even with strong deodorants, he’d smell, and the effect was like gift-wrapped BO. I recently read a report showing that botox injections in the underarm area might help. I wonder has he heard the same thing, and his life has assumed some normalcy?
A couple of years ago, when I was a stage manager, I had a hippie-chick actress. She was a very nice girl, but she did not believe in deodorant or antiperspirant. She would give you the shirt off her back, not that you’d want it. She had a funk you could taste. Seriously, you could taste the funk around her. If you opened your mouth in her presence, the funk would climb into you mouth and do the nasty dance on your tongue. It wasn’t George Clinton funk either; she had nasty landfill in the summer sun funk.
Being the stage manager, it was my job to talk to her. I wracked my brain trying to come up with a nice way to tell her that she stank. I finally sat her down and told her that she was going to have to use an antiperspirant whenever she was in costume, seeing as how we wanted to use the costume again, and the scent from her underarm sweat glands made that prospect rather unpalatable. She was rather embarrassed; I don’t think she had any clue she had the funk. I understand, it’s hard to smell yourself. Anyhow, she started using antiperspirant.
As soon as I saw this thread I was ready to post about the condition that I think jsgoddess is talking about. It’s trimethylaminuria - a genetic disorder in breaking down trimethylamine (TMA). The people with it simply can’t break that compound down, while the rest of us can, so it ends up in their sweat, and it’s got a strong fishy odor. It’s incurable of course, but there are apparently some dietary restrictions that might help… the wikipedia article says keep off the choline-containing foods, and maybe eat some charcoal (hmm… :dubious: ).
Of course, it’s pretty rare, so it’s much more likely this guy is just wearing dead rats in his pants, or engaging in some other easily changed behaviour. Definitely gotta confront him about it. Even if he has got TMAU he can at least get a professional to lay out his options.
Great OP!
I know its kind of a european thing not to bathe as much as Americans do, but this guy took the funk prize and ran with it.
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Actually, most Europeans that I know are hygienic and shower regularly. This guy is not part of the norm. Funky people are everywhere.
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Well, you need to come meet some of the folks I do then. Students that come here for NATO courses stay in the lodge at no cost to themselves and still manage to not shower regularly. These aren’t just nobodies, either, they’re mostly officers. Last July I actually had to leave a classroom in the middle of repairing the printer because of the funk. Not everyday guy sweat funk either, but brutally-awful-make-you-cry-funk. For Gawd’s sake the water ain’t costin’ them a dime in the lodge. They could take 9 showers and it wouldn’t matter.
I’m not making fun of europeans, i’m just saying that it seems that daily showers aren’t as…well, emphasized, to them. They must be used to the funk of others around them, too, becuase only the americans and canadians seem to notice the funk.
but who knows…maybe we smell funny to them?
I used to work with someone who used to take activated charcoal pills for some unspecified illness or another. (“processes of rot and ferment in the gut” – yikes!) He didn’t particularly smell, is all I can say for its efficacy.
This brings to mind two stories.
Last weekend I was visiting with my nephew who’s a freshman in college. He’s dealing with a roommate who never showers. The kid goes to class and everything, he just doesn’t shower. My nephew said he doesn’t think the kid even owns soap. Apparently the roommate’s mom drove five hours to clean his room recently and my nephew heard her inquire as to the location of her son’s toothbrush/toothpaste. The kid didn’t know where they were. My nephew is trying to get a different roommate but it’s difficult.
When I was in college I worked in housekeeping at a hotel near campus. Sometimes we had guests who were in town for business and stayed for a month or more. One such guest’s room always fascinated me. Every time I went to clean his room, I noticed that the shower had not been used. He never used the bath mat or any of the towels. There were no used bars of soap on the edge of the tub and no bottles of shampoo or body wash. Yet every day the soap and shampoo that we provided was nowhere to be seen. He even took the little plastic bags that went inside the ice buckets. I always cleaned the tub and shower anyway, even though I didn’t think it had been used. Then one day, one of the dresser drawers was left open a couple of inches, and I could see one of those plastic ice bucket bags sticking out. I peeked inside and there was a good month’s worth of soap (wrappers still on), little shampoo bottles, and plastic ice bucket bags inside. I always wondered why, if he wasn’t using these items to shower, he’d want to hoard them and take them home with him. I also wondered how he must have smelled to the poor people he was in town doing business with.
Heh. Students, eh? Same the world over, the dirty unwashed layabouts 
In the interests of spreading prejudice and stereotypes, I’ll hazard a guess that most of the real funkers come from southern or eastern europe.
:eek:
We had a similar situation during basic training. Every day we’d be out there running, exercising, doing obstacle courses, etc and this one guy refused to shower. I don’t just mean he wouldn’t do it, I mean when we told him that he smelled like the inside of a skunks asshole he laughed and said tough shit. Our drill sergeant suggested that we convince him. We dragged him into the showers, poured liquid soap on him and used scrub brushes to clean him. We threw his uniforms in there too. We told him that if he didn’t shape up that we would do that to him every night till he either started cleaning himself or else his skin came off. He started showering and doing his laundry.
We have a couple consultants in the office from India, here on work visas. They appear to be clean but whatever they are eating just pours from their bodies. I know that if I eat a lot of garlic that the next day I can repel vampires in a 10 mile radius but these guys smell every freaking day. It’s worse when they eat at their desks because the smell travels the office and lingers. I understand there is a cultural and dietary difference and I don’t want to be considered racist (foodist?) but how can I tell these guys that their food smells like summer septic tank and it is making their bodies leave a vapor trail? Maybe my Big Mac smell like crap to them but I make a point of not eating anything noxious at my desk (I kept my corned beef and cabbage in the lunch room).
yellowval:
To sell on the black market, perhaps?
Just loving this phrase.
Yes, I hear Al Gore is going to tackle extreme body odor in his next documentary – “Stankiness: Global Problem, Local Solutions”.
(BTW, Heloise, your location is very sweet.)
I used to go to a dentist who (based on a sign on his door – “Bad Breath Clinic”) happens to specialize in treatment of bad breath, and who also happens to have bad breath, which makes being treated by him a worse than usual ordeal. I do not think he is unaware of this, nor do I question his expertise in his chosen subfield of dentistry. More likely, his case just happens to be one of the intractable cases. One can’t always help how one smells.