Sitting at work and in comes my neighbor for the start of his day. He is preceded to his desk by a vast stinking cloud of some godawful dime-store oh-dee-coh-loh-nee that’s so thick my eyes are literally watering. The taste of it is coating my throat and I think I may start heaving. If I only had to put up with it until the initial vast stinking cloud dissipated, I could almost stand it, but Coco Chanel over there goes home for lunch every day and steps back under the perfume nozzle, returning with a new and exciting vast stinking cloud to choke me in the afternoon.
Dude, seriously, it’s “spray, delay, walk away,” not “douse when you leave the house.”
We have one of those at work, too. She comes in twice a week. Her smell precedes her, and it lingers after she has left the premises. Like, fifteen minutes after she’s been gone, you can still smell her godawful scent all the way down the halls and in the room where she worked. I don’t know how it’s not possible to realize you are the only person in all the people you know who wears so much perfume or cologne that people stand back from you during conversation, and keep moving backwards. Well, she’s keeping some ninth-rate perfumier in business. I wonder how many bottles it takes to fill her bathtub with it…
When we sat near a guy like that in a restaurant, my mom’s sarcastic response was, “tsk tsk. That poor man broke a whole bottle of cologne on himself.”
Give that a try, maybe it’ll get through. “Oh, jeez, dude, I’m so sorry.” “About what?” “You know, about how you broke your cologne bottle and got it all over yourself. I hate when that happens.” “…er, yeah, me too [hopefully makes mental note to scale back on the scent].”
Yeah, that’d be a good idea. Anonymously leave a copy of the thread that identifies me as one of his two neighbors on his desk. He’ll never be able to figure out my secret identity.
