Telling on myself

(from Tamie)

Last night at church, a friend/awesome mom/general all-around fantastic/kicking tail at the Y kind of girl congratulated me on blogging regularly again.

I had to admit to her it was because Bobby was out of town and I didn't have anyone to listen to all my minutiae.

Since I'm telling on myself today, I'll share the April installment of Crazy Things That Happen to Tamie at Work. (You may remember a previous episode, where I nearly impaled a college student with a bathroom stall door in the Bible building - must look for that link.)

A few weeks ago, I started smelling a strange odor in my office. It smelled like ... well, there's really no way to sugar-coat this. It smelled like a dead animal. It was faint and intermittent, but it was there, by golly.

When you smell something strange, it never fails: You want other people to smell it, too. I have no idea why we're wired this way, but admit it - if you sniff the milk and it doesn't smell so fresh, you need either sympathy or confirmation from the person standing closest to you.

So I mentioned the strange smell to Virginia, who is all about getting to the bottom of weird things that happen (one of the many things I love about Virginia.) She goes into full-on Nancy Drew and starts sniffing around my office. She smells NOTHING. I am completely unprepared for this because Virginia's nose is legendary. We sniff all around. At one point, no joke, I had my NOSE UP AGAINST THE ELECTRICAL OUTLET. Nothing. Tonda comes in and sniffs. Nothing. We recruit random folks to poke their heads in and breathe. Nada.

This goes on for a week or so, on and off, with no one smelling the faint-yet-repulsive dead animal smell except me. Virginia files a maintenance report (poor OC maintenance people, no doubt drawing straws to see who has to climb into the bowels of the Bible building and see what carnage awaits.)

A day or so later, I walk into my closet at home and smell THE TERRIBLE SMELL. Oh my goodness, it has followed me home! I start looking around, sniffing everything in sight. I pick up my new favorite pair of shoes, these cute white leather ones I just bought.

Cue the music. I sniff the tops of my pretty white shoes. Oh my goodness, I about lost my lunch - they smelled AWFUL!

The only conclusion I have is that maybe, possibly, they were treated with some toxic chemical to keep them cute and white. And that when I wore them to work and sat down at my computer for a long time, my nose was close enough to my shoes to detect the awfulness - no one else had the same perspective.

I'm sure you'll all rejoice with me and the OC maintenance folks now that the source of THE TERRIBLE SMELL has been found. I do know how to clear a room ...