Let's ponder what's up with people who don't bathe regularly.

[Azeotrope]

Nor will we respond to phone calls asking for Seymour Harry Butts.

My uncle only showers when he goes to the gym so he doesn’t run up his water bill :smack: He has mental health issues and when things are going badly he doesn’t go to the gym. If he doesn’t go to the gym, he doesn’t shower.

At my last job I also worked (thankfully, briefly) with a woman who didn’t shower because “her husband’s allergic to fragrances.” When the manager took her aside and suggested very diplomatically that there’s such stuff as unscented soap and antiperspirant she up and quit.

[Marc_Xenos]

@norinew

We’re a tough crowd. We also will not ask the question “What’s a ‘henway’?”

So I guess a Grecian urn is out of the question. Remind me not to drink with you guys. On another thread, I’d have included the night we were all so drunk, we didn’t even bother with the jokes. We’d just say the punchlines and bust out laughing.

“Ping pong balls??? I thought you said King Kong’s balls!!!”

And then laughing our asses off, and then another drink, another punchline…

[Marc_Xenos]

I gotta tell you, Google scares the crap out of me. I figured someone looked up the joke, so I keyed in legendary Fu bird, and there’s my frickin’ post from this message board. Already. Screw the CIA. And that Justin guy from Wikileaks. Ain’t nothing safe around here.

Except the story of the legendary Fu bird. From India.

[norinew]

@Marc_Xenos

I gotta tell you, Google scares the crap out of me. I figured someone looked up the joke, so I keyed in legendary Fu bird, and there’s my frickin’ post from this message board. Already. Screw the CIA. And that Justin guy from Wikileaks. Ain’t nothing safe around here.

Except the story of the legendary Fu bird. From India.

The other thing that’s safe is Bacardi 151; I mean, seriously, the shit’s 75% pure alcohol; nothing evil is gonna live in that bottle except the hangover, y’know?

[Frank]

@Marc_Xenos

Except the story of the legendary Fu bird. From India.

We don’t need to ask; we already know. If the Fu shits, wear it. (And it’s Foo, and it’s Spider Robinson.)

[Lamia]

@olivesmarch4th

It kills me that bathing didn’t even used to be a regular thing. Every time I watch a TV show or movie set in the olden-times, all romanticism is just vanquished by the knowledge that the noble woman or the handsome knight probably smelled terrible.

No cite and no details, but on vacation in Europe I visited a medieval castle and one of the exhibits was about medieval bathing. There was a (replica?) wooden bathtub, some examples of period illustrations showing people bathing, and the informational sign said it’s a myth that people in the Middle Ages did not bathe – upperclass people at least bathed regularly. The poor presumably would have been limited by space and the time/money/effort involved in heating large quantities of water.

[Autolycus]

Fuzz? FUZZ?! AAAAAAHHHH!!! runs around in circles, screaming

I had a period this winter where I had super-duper dry skin that was exacerbated by showering. I don’t have excessively bad BO and lately don’t exercise much so I ummm, :o, thought I didn’t need to shower more than a few times a week. I did the pit check and thought all was well. After a few weeks, a co-worker politely informed me that I was mistaken. Oh the humanity. I now know I can’t trust myself to notice my own funk. My girlfriend seriously claimed I smelled great! She also cannot be trusted in regards to malodorous mishaps…

That guy is in a whole different universe of funkiness though. Damn.

[panache45]

@TheChileanBlob

I love the feeling of being fresh and clean but I really hate to shower and brush my teeth. I have to force myself to do it.

This is the irony of the situation. When I’m going through a period of depression, I know that I’ll feel better if I shower. You’d think I’d take six showers a day, just to lift my mood. But no, I don’t shower and just get more and more miserable.

And I also eat when I’m depressed . . . knowing that all those extra calories will just make the depression worse. But I do it anyway.

Depression is a might powerful monster, and cannot be reasoned with.

[Guinastasia]

GAH!!! I can’t imagine not showering every day. If I start getting dry skin, that’s what lotion is for. (And you can get unscented). There’s no way I’m giving up daily bathing. And my hair is the type that has to be washed daily.

When I was depressed, I didn’t give up bathing – I even stayed in the shower more. (Well, it was more like I’d curl up in the tub, and just sort of let the spray hit me. Almost like I was hiding in there.)

I don’t know if it’s my OCD or what, but I HATE the feeling of not being clean. When I was in the hospital about, oh, five years ago, I couldn’t take a shower for about four or five days, and I was about ready to climb the walls.

shudder

[Marc_Xenos]

@Frank

We don’t need to ask; we already know. If the Fu shits, wear it. (And it’s Foo, and it’s Spider Robinson.)

Geez, what it takes to get a lousy punchline. Glad I don’t drink with you guys, it’d be a quiet night! And it’s Julian Assange. Although I don’t know about his bathing habits. Probably the only thing NOT on Wikileaks.

[Marc_Xenos]

@norinew

The other thing that’s safe is Bacardi 151; I mean, seriously, the shit’s 75% pure alcohol; nothing evil is gonna live in that bottle except the hangover, y’know?

You’re right, but after a fifth of that stuff, nobody cares who’s bathing.

[Marc_Xenos]

My wife asked me if I took a shower. I said, why, is one missing?
~ Rodney Dangerfield
(padabum!)

[chizzuk]

@Martin_Hyde

You know some people can bathe regularly and still have horrible body odor. It could be because of bad diet (some diets, especially if heavy in fatty foods) can in some people cause strong body odor that regular bathing and deodorant won’t entirely mask. Some people just have issues that regardless of diet they’re going to stink. If you’re ever in a pharmacy you may notice there are usually some OTC deodorants that cost like $10.00 or more for a small container (where regularly they cost $3.00-4.00 around here), these are “prescription strength” and are marketed for people with this problem. My understanding is dermatologists can even prescribe actual prescription deodorant for people with more serious problems along this line.

So hey, the co-worker you were laughing at very well could have been bathing every day.

I watched a show on Discovery Health about a woman who had a disease called trimethylaminuria. Her liver couldn’t break down trimethylamine from foods she ate and it caused her to stink of rotting fish for years. Finally a doctor figured it out and she went on a strict elimination diet and solved the issue, but it must have been horrible. She had no social life because no one would get near her.

[Guinastasia]

Yeah, but how common is that?

[Kozmik]

@alice_in_wonderland

So, I’ll preface this by saying that I do have a specific person in mind with this post; however, I haven’t seen him in about 20 years, have no plans to see him, and at this point I’m not that concerned with his well being so there’s no need to suggest a bathing intervention or anything - he is now stinking up other people’s lives.

Wait - he hasn’t bathed or showered in 20 years. :eek:

[Suil_Dubh]

@Martin_Hyde

You know some people can bathe regularly and still have horrible body odor. It could be because of bad diet (some diets, especially if heavy in fatty foods) can in some people cause strong body odor that regular bathing and deodorant won’t entirely mask. Some people just have issues that regardless of diet they’re going to stink. If you’re ever in a pharmacy you may notice there are usually some OTC deodorants that cost like $10.00 or more for a small container (where regularly they cost $3.00-4.00 around here), these are “prescription strength” and are marketed for people with this problem. My understanding is dermatologists can even prescribe actual prescription deodorant for people with more serious problems along this line.

I once lived in a large house with about six or seven other punks and hippies. None of us showered every day, but we would all shower a couple of times a week, and we were all surprisingly clean. (We even washed the dishes regularly: our mothers would have been proud.)

Anyway, one of my roommates at the time had the same unshakeable strong body odor problem.

Like us, he would shower fairly regularly, but he had a very, very bad odor problem anyway. I don’t think it would have mattered had he showered every day. More of a “smelly sneaker” odor than an “armpit B.O.” smell. He could leave a room, and it would still smell strongly of him for up to 30 min or so.

He was seeing a doctor about it, and was using some kind of medication, but it obviously wasn’t working (or he wasn’t using it properly).

He was a nice enough guy, but I was quite selfishly relieved when he finally moved out.

[lisacurl]

I’ve also noticed a few coworkers over the years who were very probably functional alcoholics who had a… less-than-stringent approach to personal hygiene. That is, they almost always smelled funky, always looked disheveled and untidy, sometimes smelled really bad. Not sure if it was a matter of passing out at night and then running late in the morning, or whether the alcohol use actually changed their body odor. Possibly both.

I’ve also worked with a younger guy who never outgrew his college era approach to laundry. He always smelled musty, and my husband was the one who finally figured it out… dude was showering daily but didn’t wash his clothes enough.

[crypto]

This thread brought back a waft of odor from my past. I was in charge of an international project that required a number of different cultures to sit in a relatively small space.

My counterpart, a woman (allegedly) from a western european country NOT France, reeked to high heaven. It was strange. She washed once a week. By Friday, you didn’t want to be near her.

Now, she was in charge of the technical people and scheduling. I received a ton of complaints (not that I needed them… my nose isn’t broken), so I decided to go to HR and ask what they recommend. Since they were a multinational company, this could have not been the first time this question came up.

HR’s response? This has come before, so if you come up with something, please bring it to us so we can use it in future cases. (Once again, HR proving that it’s not only useless, but is the single biggest drain of resources on any company). These people are making large salaries, and yet spend most of their time eating paste.

Anyway, solution? Ignore it. Since she was a woman (allegedly), I would not in any way suggest to her that she needs to bathe, wash, shower, or whatever on a regular basis for fear of HR backlash on me.

How bad was it? When the project was just kicking off, she and I would have to spend the entire day together going over budgets, timelines, how we were going to manage the project, etc. Prep work that must be done. She liked to sit in my office (not an option - she had a funk like the Seinfeld episode) or in a small conference room. A bit better, but she loved to keep the doors closed.

I could not eat lunch with her because I couldn’t keep food down. I would leave our meetings regularly to get some air, only to find out that her funk stuck to me and would follow me where ever I went. My wife could smell it when i got home. It was in my car. I showered at least twice a day, and I still couldn’t tame the beast.

I do not understand these people or how they can’t smell themselves.

For those in this thread that have admitted depression and/or bipolar, doesn’t the odor make you more depressed? Just wondering. Not taking your condition lightly, but it would seem to me that one thing you can usually control is your own hygiene.

[Guinastasia]

People actually get used the smell – most people can’t smell themselves. Think of smokers. They really don’t notice their own odors.

And like I said, when I was depressed, I used to curl up in the shower and just stay there. (Hell, I still do that if I’ve had a bad day. I consider the water almost like therapy, in a way – sort of soothing.) But then, I just like water. Maybe I was a fish in a previous life.

But everyone’s different.

[bengangmo]

@Otara

A quick google for ‘fear of washing’ gives ‘ablutophobia’.

Otara

Is that anything like fear of the villian in Popeye cartoons?