DOING THE CAN-CAN!
Our office is quite nice, decent surroundings, pleasant co-workers, it’s clean, quiet, well lit, and generally speaking I don’t mind spending my time there; although if someone published a guide to cubicle etiquette I wouldn’t pass it up, in fact I would probably be the first in line to buy a copy. Then (picture an evil sneer) I’d wrap it in beautiful paper, top it off with a coordinated bow and anonymously place it on the desk in the cubicle across the aisle from mine.
Ah yes, across the aisle… you wonder why I would give such a gift to anyone working in such a pleasant place, but then there’s always one, and of course he sits across the aisle from me. Hour after hour I see, hear and smell him, which brings us to the real problem, his diet. He eats non-stop, the day starts with him eating before he even logs onto the computer, then its meal after meal after meal, drink after drink, snack after snack. The worst is when he eats low fat hotdogs for lunch, he’ll have 4 or 5 of them lined up and one by one this mountain of a man will daintily dip them into a container of ketchup and inhale them.
Sigh, of course everything he ingests boils and bubbles, then pop! The hotdogs are the worst, not even twenty minutes after he eats he starts to break wind… this goes on for 5 minutes or more, but when it gets to the point of no return, he literally jumps out of his chair and rushes off to the men’s room. Personally I wish he’d move his workspace in there so he didn’t have so far to go, and it would spare everyone in the area the misery of smelling his “second hand air.” It’s gotten so bad that the admin in our area passed out cans of Lysol disinfectant spray.
Of course today was a hotdog fest and just like clockwork twenty minutes after his feeding frenzy ended little noises and pungent smells started emanating from across the aisle, I turned on my little personal fan and pointed it discreetly in his direction. Then sure enough he hopped out of his seat, rushed around the corner, and out of sight. I quickly sprang into action; I grabbed the can of spray and started spraying the area to rid it of the offensive odor. My colleague, who sits on the opposite side of this guy, started to laugh when she heard the hissing of the Lysol and stood up to watch me. We started to laugh and since the combination of Lysol and his sirocco wind was making us sick we walked off for a cup of coffee. While the coffee was brewing we discussed the disgusting predicament we were in and of course at that moment the HR person came to get a cup of coffee too. She started to laugh when she overheard our conversation about this guy’s penchant for popping his cork so often. Then my colleague pointed at me and said with a smile, “if it hadn’t been for her quick thinking to use the Lysol, we probably would have passed out on the spot”. And that’s when the smile flew from the HR lady’s face and she turned on me and venomously hissed at me “You can’t spray Lysol in the office area, someone might complain about the smell!”
We were so shocked at her response we just walked away dumbfounded, shaking our heads at the stupidity of it all and as we started back to our desks we agreed that no matter what HR said we’d much rather smell what came out of a Lysol can than what comes out of his can. So now all do is position the fan to point ever so slightly toward the aisle and every once in awhile I’ll give it a shot of Lysol just because I shouldn’t.
CD
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