I can’t get this scent out of my head

I had a visitor to my office yesterday.  The person was obviously a chain-smoker who had to interface with the public and so employed various scent masking agents to cover the smoke smell.  We had an “interesting” meeting and not a pleasant meeting and the problem with this scenario is that the persons scent seemed to linger all day.

I should add in the interest of full disclosure that I have almost no sense of smell.  I had it at one time and not sure what happened to it.  My theories are that it shut down during the summer I worked de-beaking chickens.  What would your smell cells do if they worked in a very hot chicken barn/outhouse burning the beaks of chickens flat all day long day after day?  The chicken poop was absolutely horrible but only marginally worse then the burnt beak smoke.  The second theory is the cells went on leave during my job as a dishwasher.  There’s something about breathing in scalding hot steam for hours on end that my nose didn’t like.  My fingers and most of the rest of my body didn’t like this job either but that’s a blog for another day.

So I got this guy in my office and the scent doesn’t go away.  I started thinking about it more and more and then left my office for awhile and came back and I still had the same scent in my nose.  So I thought to myself, ‘Wow that scent was so strong it must have stuck to the inside of my nose.’  Then I thought about it some more and this seemed less and less likely.  I finally concluded the scent got stuck in my brain.  It was like a song you hear that just keeps playing in your head and won’t go away.  Think about it – your ears hear a song, you stop hearing the song, the song keeps playing in your head.  Why can’t the same thing happen with smells?

I don’t know why or how the scent seemed to last forever but by the end of the day, I was anxious to move on to any other scent.  The smell reminded me of the meeting and so I kept thinking of this meeting all day.  I finally escaped the scent by going to workout.  I am not sure if all the breathing cleansed the scent from my nose or the exercise cleared my brain of the thought of the scent.

So the next time you get a smell that sticks with you, see if you can figure out whether it’s a mental of physical manifestation.  Then again, maybe this doesn’t happen to you or anyone else in which case I am probably some sort of idiot (savant) or mentally ill.

Tags: lingering odor, mental scent, Scent, smell