Scent

The guy in the office next to mine likes to drink protein shakes, because he works out and thinks it’s something you have to do. I drink them too, but I’m not as fixated on them as he is. He drinks one every three hours or so. I don’t know what effect this is going to have on his future, but it can’t be good. He gets laid a lot, though, and he makes it look easy, so maybe there’s something to his routine. I don’t know.

Protein shakes go rotten quickly. This is because protein undergoes a process called denaturing when you leave it at room temperature too long. When protein shakes denature, they smell like a pile of rotting corpses left in the trunk of a car would smell in Mississippi at low tide in July. You don’t even bother washing out the bottle, because the stink seeps into the plastic and it doesn’t come out. This happens to me all the time because I hate protein shakes and don’t drink enough of them to remember to clean out my shaker bottles right away. I’m proud of this.

This guy’s office started to stink yesterday, and he figured out this was because there was a denaturing protein shake sitting behind all the shit piled up on his desk. Instead of taking the bottle outside to a Dumpster, he brought it into my office to show me, and stood there explaining the situation longer than he should have. It took a little while, but my office eventually smelled like a pile of rotting corpses left in the trunk of a car in Mississippi at low tide in July, just like his.

This made me angry, so when he came back from getting rid of the bottle, I marched into his office and demanded satisfaction. “My office fucking stinks now,” I said. “You have anything I can spray?”

“Use this shit,” he said, and handed me a squat green bottle of cologne with a familiar alligator on its front.

“Izod?”

“No, it’s Lacoste.”

Today, his girlfriend, who works for another division of our company, came into my office and sat in one of my “client chairs.” I have these because I’m now an important guy who has meetings in my office, if you can believe that. Since she’s dating him, she always comes in and hangs out with me after she’s spoken to him. I used to hate it when people walked into my office and sat down. Now, not so much. I talk to people all day long about football and my social life. I even have theme songs for certain people. Most of these are performed by Santana. When a Peruvian coworker comes in, I play Oye Como Va or Low Rider. I once played Babalou and expected an HR complaint, but he thought this was funny. When a hot girl comes in, I play Black Magic Woman. They seem to like that.

“I heard he had a little problem with a protein shake yesterday,” his girlfriend says to me.

“Yeah. The fuckin’ thing stunk, and then he sprayed cologne all over the place, and it stunk even worse.”

“What cologne?”

“That Izod shit,” I reply. “I can still fuckin’ smell it in here.”

“It’s Lacoste, and I gave it to him.”

“Oh.”

So, later on, I tell the guy the story of how I insulted the gift his girlfriend had given him.

“I felt kind of bad,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t even wear cologne. You want it?”

“Nah. I’ve got matches.”