[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
Yeah, but at least the homeless-Japanese or not-have an excuse.
[segue]
I’m an obsessive bather-(maybe it’s the OCD).
[/QUOTE]
Ok, so there was no seque, but damned if I didn’t reread a couple times looking for one.
Is it possible that he’s bathing, but not using soap? Sometimes that’ll do it. You can take all the showers you want, but if you’re not actually washing yourself, what good will it do?
How is it that some people cannot smell themselves? Just curious.
Since I’ve started working out at the workplace gym, I’ve come to realize just how rank and musty the guys can get. I don’t mean that a gal couldn’t reek, but I honestly don’t notice a strong stench coming from the women even when they’re sweaty.
What is it about the body chemistry?
[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
How is it that some people cannot smell themselves? Just curious.
[/QUOTE]
I know that smokers have a greatly reduced sense of smell.
[QUOTE=yellowval]
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.
[/QUOTE]
When I go out of town on business, I collect the little bottles of soap and shampoo. I use my own conditioner and soap. When I’ve got a good sized bag of mini soaps and such, I donate them to the local homeless shelter. I learned the trick from a flight attendant friend of mine.
She said that a lot of her fellow attendants do the same thing.
Sorry I can’t answer the rest of the mystery though. Maybe he was showering at the gym?
If it’s really that intense, I’d confront him directly about it. And if that threatened my job, I’d write an anonymous letter.
[QUOTE=slaphead]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I hate to admit that you’d be right. I don’t like stereotypes, but I can’t deny that.
I work with an italian guy that must drink five pots of coffee a day and smoke 2 packs of cigarettes while hes doing it. It gives him an aura of smokey-coffee grinds funk. On a hot summer day it can be pretty damned powerful. I think it melted my dogtags once.
[QUOTE=yellowval]
Last weekend I was visiting with my nephew who’s a freshman in college. He’s dealing with a roommate who never showers.
[/QUOTE]
One of my classmates in college had two room-mates who went well beyond (beneath?) your nephew’s roomie. The two individuals in question didn’t bother to bathe, nor did they bother to clean their flatware, dishes, or pots and pans. Odd thing, though, is that they did re-use the aforementioned funkified items. I think it’s a miracle that anyone could survive that.
I recall the one and only time I visited my friend in that apartment. I think my nose wanted to sue my feet for walking into the place.
[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]
Lord help me they just reeked of dirty asshole. Both of them. As a team.
[/QUOTE]
The Smother Brothers?
[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
How is it that some people cannot smell themselves? Just curious.
Since I’ve started working out at the workplace gym, I’ve come to realize just how rank and musty the guys can get. I don’t mean that a gal couldn’t reek, but I honestly don’t notice a strong stench coming from the women even when they’re sweaty.
What is it about the body chemistry?
[/QUOTE]
Well, you don’t smell things that you get used to. Like how people whose houses reek of cat don’t smell it anymore. If what you get used to is “you”, I’m sure you wouldn’t smell a thing. I’m sure people who lived in smelly parts of history thought it normal as well.
[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
Since I’ve started working out at the workplace gym, I’ve come to realize just how rank and musty the guys can get. I don’t mean that a gal couldn’t reek, but I honestly don’t notice a strong stench coming from the women even when they’re sweaty.
[/QUOTE]
I’d rather endure the stench of rank and musty guys at my gym, than that of all the women on weird diets with their silent-but-deadly effluvia, which they release in the mistaken thought that no-one will know it was them.
Oh, we know. Paint peeling from the walls, asthmatics needing resuscitation, and small children crying and running for their mommies – all leading back to Ground Zero on the elliptical, who is busy trying to look innocent while fanning herself with her People magazine.
The rankness and mustiness from sweat, that I expect. Butt-bombs is well beyond the Pale, though.
Like many here, I have my own tale to tell -
I live in Richmond, VA, which during the summer can be like living in a steam bath. The air will get so thick and heavy with humidity that it feels like being wrapped in wet wool. Just walking from your car to the office will get you wringing wet with sweat. The type of sweat that runs down between your shoulder blades and soaks through your shirt. The type of sweat that clings to you because there is so much moisture in the air that it has no chance to evaporate.
Imagine, then, the co-worker I had who liked to brag that she had the lowest water bill in the city. Brenda was an extremely overweight black woman who worked the phones at a former place of employment. As was the style at the time (god, I sound like Abe Simpson), she wore her hair in this intricate swirling, curled, highly coiffed style that must have been held in place with several pounds of pommade and several cans of hairspray. Being so intricate, it kept her from washing her hair regularly. Imagine a meringue of steel wool liberally sprinkled with talcum powder and coated in vaseline and you’ll get the impression of this woman’s dandruff encrusted noggin. Add to that the heat, humidity, and her reluctance to bathe and you have a olfactory disaster waiting to happen.
The miasma that followed the woman around was gut wrenching. Unwashed hair and hair products, oppresive sweat smell, topped off with some sort of cheap perfume that was cloyingly sweet. You could actually taste the odor if you happened to get trapped behind her. I once saw an elevator full of people get off rather than ride up with her.
To top it off, I once answered the telephone and it was a gentleman calling for Brenda. It was the Friday before a long holiday weekend and he had obviously gotten an early start from the slurring. When I told him she wasn’t around, he said, “Well tell her that I’m home…we’re going to get together and make us some love.” The thought of her rolling around in the sweltering summer heat, all sweaty and …dewy…made me want to poke my mind’s eye out with a sharp stick.