If only it were possible to include a 'scratch-n-sniff' .jpg with this post.
But (thankfully for you) I can't.
About a year ago we had a foul (FOUL, I tell you!) smell that hung around the front office of my work. It appeared one day and was gone the next.
Then it happened again. And then it wafted around for a couple of days.
It seemed to happen after a building next to us had been bought and began producing food products. We never smelled it before then.
Not to name the company, but the smell was reminiscent of spoiled onions and rotting garbage.
(The food company next door makes Italian foodstuffs for the restaurant business industry)
It was logical to think that maybe something in their building was venting out towards ours, so we asked a couple of the head honchos over to breath deep and tell us what they were making that smelled so bad.
"That's not us", they said. "That smells more like raw sewage. Maybe you have a plumbing problem."
Ironically enough, the smell stopped after that and we didn't have any other problems with it.
Until this week.
It came back again.
We'd been having problems with a smoke detector in the front office so the Heating & A/C guy closed off our outside vents to see if that helped.
It did, sort of. The smoke alarm functioned properly now (it was picking up diesel fumes from construction equipment behind us) but the unholy smell had taken over the front office.
We opened the doors to vent our building and had him come back to open those vents back up.
The smell dissapated and we were able to finish the day.
But yesterday, after the noon hour the smell starting coming back and became stronger as the day continued. It seemed to be coming from our electrical closet, so I opened the door and.....
WHEW! Yeah, it was coming from there alright!
Same thing happened today. The morning was fine but after 12:00 it starts to stink.
You can't smell it outside the building, which is a good indicator that the food plant next to us really isn't the culprit.
However our upstairs sewer pipes run along the wall of where the smell is emanating from.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a leak anywhere, so nobody knows where this smell is originating. And to make matters worse, the one person who needs to get it fixed (if indeed it can be) is the boss... who can't smell it.
Everybody else can, but not him. So when we try to describe it, we all smell it differently and since none of our descriptions are the same, he doesn't know what the problem is.
I'll tell you, it's pretty sad when the restroom smells better than the front office.
That's how bad it gets.
3 things people had to say:
I must just add he and/or she that smelt it dealt it
I don't think that the boss *can't* smell it. He's refusing to smell it. He's willing to pretend that, well, his shit don't stink, because then it becomes his responsibility to get it fixed.
Damn you Palindrome for getting to the smelt/dealt joke first.
What an appropriate post for your blog! I had the same problem at the last place I worked. The company was on the 2nd, 15th, and 16th floors of the same building. The 2nd floor was used for client meetings. Some mornings the front hallway to the receiption area reeked of raw sewage. And of course the building owners could never get rid of the smell. It didn't help that the building was 85 years old either.
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