Emily A. Benton

This is one of those blog entries bound to be found by a future employer, but I can’t hold back any longer. I’ve reached the end of my keep-your-mouth-shut rope.

There is someone who uses the women’s bathroom at my workplace who sprays a vanilla/floral body mist each time she does a no. 2. I know this for a fact. It’s one of those things you notice only if you’ve been working/living at a place for a long time, and have become accustomed to its smells (olfaction is the most memorable of the senses, after all).

I know what the restroom air freshener smells like, and it’s not this scent, which appears sporadically and only once a day around the same 3 stalls. It’s gotten to where as soon as I smell this particular fragrance mixed with the odor of you-know-what, I start doing double takes and spinning around to see if I can catch the mystery woman with the spray bottle hidden in her pocket.

I still haven’t figured out who she is, which is for the best, because I’d probably walk up and whisper close enough for her to smell my coffee breath “Who do you think you’re kidding?” Or I’d try to strike up a conversation about beans and your heart with her in the kitchen, or complain loudly about air pollution contributed by cow carbon emissions in the hallway outside her cubical EVERY DAY until I saw her face twitch and then she’d confess to either growing up in solitary confinement with Koalas or to being born with the supernatural power to smell “pretty.”

File this under the rest of inappropriate topics that rack my brain each week, but I just had to share this in case any guys reading this really think it’s nothing but roses down there for most women. Or for this woman’s husband, if he ever does a Google for “female poop smells.” I know you’ve tried to believe her. Maybe it was even once a fantasy of yours. But this has gone on long enough. For you, dear sir, I’m writing this here and now to tell you YOU’VE BEEN FOOLED.