There's.... a smell.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I mean, there’s often a smell. I work in a downtown library; smells are our stock in trade. (I bet you were thinking it’s books - no, it’s funky smells. Sometimes the book you want will be checked out or lost, but I can always offer you a smell.) But today… Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, today.

There’s a poo smell. Kind of a rotten poo smell. As if something shit itself and then died, or possibly died and then shit itself. Several days ago.

It moves. It’s been near the newspapers, and then it moved through the bound volumes. It wafted around the microfilm readers for a time.

The thing is, usually such a thing is directly and obviously attached to a person. There’s a particular patron who stops my breathing yards away just out of reflex, and when I get yards past him and venture a breath the smell is still there. It’s like Foul Ole Ron in a Discworld novel - it lingers. It has a personality. It may have a library card.

But this seems to be… discorporeal. I mean, it has to be organic in nature, and it has to be from somebody who’s been here all day, because of the movement. (Also, it auto-refreshes.) But there’s nobody there! Somebody who casually walks through the area, drops a killer fart, and then goes about his or her business while the fart remains? (I have never, yet never, smelled such a poop-like fart. Sorry - a rotten poop-like fart.) The Ghost of Periodicals Past? Mr. Hanky has come early?

I even did a little tentative smell-testing of the “mosey past the homeless people and sniff around like a really gross game of Hotter or Colder” sort. Came up completely empty. Don’t get me wrong - there were smells. It’s winter and there are a lot of homeless people around. But none of them were the right smell.

So what the hell is that smell? Have you ever played “What’s That Smell” and lost? I mean, trust me, it’s a popular game in my kitchen, too, but eventually I tend to find the rotten onion or potato or, god help us, cauliflower. Where is this rotten person?

2

Has one of my dogs been visiting your library? Because our lab lets loose with farts that smell like something crawled up in his ass and died a week ago, and then crawled out and rotted under a desert sun for another week just for good measure.

I worked for a law office years ago that had a client who was the single worst-smelling person I have ever encountered. We are talking a stench that not only filled the room he was in, but wafted down the (long) hallway and infiltrated every nook and cranny of the place. He was apparently going to sit in the lobby for 24 hours till his paperwork was ready, but one of the guys who was braver than the rest of us gave him 20 bucks and told him to go away and not come back till the next day.

Some smells are truly awe-inspiring in their awfulness.

3

Hell, my boyfriend last week ate a reuben sandwich and for two days let fly with farts that even he thought smelled bad. Seriously, they didn’t even smell like organic compounds.

One of my coworkers said, “Maybe somebody is leaking.”

4

Can’t help you on the smell source, but I sure do like “discorporeal” and it shall be my word of the day.

Could the manifestation of a library haunting in fact be a smell? :wink:

5

Yeah. Diabetic farts are the worst.

6

It’s a python slithering through the library.

I have to ask now, do other people smell it? Does it only follow you around? Do you have dog poo on your shoes. If you have floor heating ducts maybe there is poo in there. Maybe you have a dead animal in the air exchange system.

7

I was really and truly afraid that somehow it was me! Because for a while I was asking people if they smelled it and they’d say, “I don’t know, I’m all stuffed up.” or “I can’t smell very well - all that smoking” and I thought, oh my god, what if they’re just being nice and it’s me?

It isn’t, though. Everybody smells it now.

No floor heating ducts. I kind of looked around and it doesn’t seem to be concentrated near the vents in the ceiling or anything.

8

You don’t serve food so this isn’t all that likely but rats and mice leave a horrible smell behind when they die behind walls or under floorboards. It’s so nasty that I don’t think that you could have been the only one that smelled it at first, though.

9

Listen…do you smell something?

You’ve got to make contact. Someone should actually try to speak to it.

10

I might guess that. The sublime Penelope Houston, who for a number of years made her “straight” living as a media librarian in San Francisco, once remarked in an interview that carpets and libraries were a bad mix. In particular she noted one homeless fellow who came in and dribbled little droplets of diarrhea up and down the library halls ( presumably running down his pants legs ), causing considerable difficulty in tracking down and finally eradicating the stench ( if they ever truly did ).

11

there was a promo for a kids book that had an “air fresh” thing with it. had uranus in the title and of course all of the resulting hilarity dealing with boys and butt jokes.

the “air fresh” thing was the most disgusting thing ever smelled. i have no idea what they used on it but it was impressive in the frangrance.

could one of these gotten loose in your library? they were attached to the back cover of the kids book.

12

My guess would be a dead mouse, but I have no clue why the smell is moving? hmmm

13

Okay, I’m not sure if this is it… but when all the homeless guys left today one of them did have a… stain in the appropriate region, and that was one of the guys who was at least once in an area of higher concentration. Of course, it could be entirely coincidental. Or he could even have shit his pants and not be the author of my personal particular poop smell. But when I got home I could still smell it and I had to take a shower. And this is from somebody who smells nasty things for a living and has become largely immune. Not immune as in “autopsy technician”, but still pretty immune.

14

My Many Smells, by The Dead Milkmen.

15

Zsofia, have you noticed any of the following at work?

[ul][li]Books levitating across the aisle[]Card catalogue drawers opening and flinging their contents into the air[]Hi, Opal![/ul][/li]You may just need a Ghostbuster! By the way, is this smell peanutty? Maybe an old Cromer’s ghost got lost.

16

This happened once when I was temping at one of the companies I was doing data entry for. The rat had died in the upstairs call center area, and it smelled so strongly and so bad that we could still detect the stench downstairs and across the building from the room. How on earth they all made us still work that day while they cleaned up I will never know. :eek:

Despite the year or so I’ve been working at the public library, I have never smelled a smell as bad as that dead rat.