Smells

You know how you can smell someone after they've walked through an area? Like a lingering of their perfume or pheromones in the air?

My engineers always tell me that they know when I'm at work because they can smell my perfume. "But not in a bad way," they'll say. "In a good way. You don't wear too much. Just enough in fact! Totally just enough." Flatterers.

Well, as the property manager in a building with approximately 600 people in it, one who is often running back and forth between my office and our engineering department - I smell a lot of people. Mostly they are good smells. There is the one lady who leaves the bathroom smelling like Fritos, which is totally weird, but not terribly unpleasant. There have been those ladies leaving the bathroom smelling quite a bit worse, so Fritos, while odd, isn't bad.

And then there is the lady who uses cheap soap. I want to buy her some good smelling soap and give it to her as a gift, so she'll stop stinking up the bathroom with the cheap soap smell, but alas, I've never seen who she is, and the Aveda lady would probably snag it if I left it there undirected.

Well, today (and this is a long, tangential post trying to get to this point) I walked into the corridor and strongly smelled.... dirt.

DIRT. Good, old fashioned dirt. And it wasn't the telephone lady, who smelled like minty gum. It wasn't the security guard (who smells like farts or some musky essential oil, depending on which guard it is) no it was someone else who smelled like dirt.

Like it smells when you garden and you turn up fresh earth. Slightly metallic smelling, but overwhelmingly natural and earthy. Dirt. There's just no other way to describe this smell.

And it got me wondering. When they get wet, do they smell like mud?

Because, eeew.