I’m standing at the water fountain at work filling my water bottle. (Gotta drink those 6-8 glasses of water a day — which then necessitates the exercise of walking to the bathroom a hundred times daily . . .)
A faint odor assaults my nose. I sniff. I sniff again. I vaguely recognize it. I dig through all of those millions of synapses that my highly active intellectual brain has created. Where, oh where now, did I place that smell memory? Did my hippocampus reject that little memory and send it packing into the black hole of forgetfulness (that is sadly getting bigger and bigger the older and older I get)?
Ah ha! I remember now. It smells like my son when he returned home from milking cows at a neighboring dairy. And boy, he stunk stank stinked sure smelled horrid!
It was a combined smell of iodine and other chemicals that were nameless to me. It came from the solution he used to sanitize the udders before he attached the milking machine.
His clothing absorbed the insidious smell so much that I made him keep his jacket out in the garage and we washed his clothing separately. Even after being washed, they still came out smelling that nauseating smell.
When I recognized the smell, I stood aghast at the water fountain. Surely, oh surely, the janitors don’t use the same solution to clean the water fountain that dairymen use to clean their cows?
I slowly backed away from the water fountain, my hands shaking from my olfactory memory. I just couldn’t fill my water bottle after smelling THAT smell.
I just might be water-challenged today . . .
I certainly hope they don’t use the very same solution…how would the dairymen collect their used solution and transport it to campus? It would be so udderly complicated.
Well, I didn’t mean the exact same solution re-purposed for my work place. (However, it wast the BYU dairy that Kevin worked at and I am currently employed at BYU . . .) Not only would it be udderly complicated (you are so punny!) it would be udderly gross!