In-Stinked

As I have stated before, I’m not asking for a return to some imagined ‘good old days’. I am not convinced there were any. If the good old days were really that good, people would have lived longer during them.

But something has been happening at work over the last couple of days that made me wonder if we haven’t strayed a little far from our natural domains.

We had an absolutely horrible smell blowing up and down our end of the building. Foul. Eye-wateringly bad. Leave-the-room-run-outside-heave-gasp-try-and-man-up-because-you’ve-got-a-lot-of-work-to-do-go-back-in-roll-your-eyes-give-up-and-move-somewhere-else bad. Potentially life-threateningly noxious. Worse than the guy who used to run the corner store who was known as Stinky Joe.

And none of us, not one, could positively identify what it was.

“That’s sewage.”

“Dead rat in the air-con.”

“Nah, that’s the smell of something electrical and expensive giving up the ghost.”

“Well I think it’s dust burning off the motors.”

“You’re all idiots. Get back to work.”

Turns out it was broken sewage pipes dragging the aroma into the building… and none of us were sure what the smell was.

That seems alarming to me.

If I think of all the diseases you can get by wading around knee deep in human excrement, I would have thought it would be an evolutionary advantage to be able to identify the muck - at a distance. It seems not.

If any of us were transported back to a 17th Century village, we would die instantly from being unable to identify what was deadly, off, second hand or diseased.

I would also spend an inordinate amount of time on the ducking stool for being a mouthy old guy who kept carrying on about how good the new days are going to be.