In Which We Play 'Name That Smell' or The Day I Got High On Windex

For the love of God.

As you know from previous posts dating back to months ago, my office is being renovated. Very, very, very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that I no longer remember what it's like to work in a place where there is drywall up on the walls. This place looks like what I picture a property management office should look like in a Red Zone in Baghdad. Now, I'm not exaggerating, for once. Really, all the furniture is pulled into the middle of the rooms, there is plastic sheeting up, and in some places there's exposed insulation.

I have adapted. There are benefits to this, like being able to write bad words in the dust on people's desks. You can hide really well if you are so inclined. Why, just the other day I needed more envelopes and everyone thought I was gone for good. It's because I was tired after climbing the printer table, skittering over a desk, and lowering myslef into the crawl space by the supply shelves. Once I was down there I thought I would rest a while and no one could find me.

Well, now there are smells. They are new and they are not good. They make me feel insane. They are unidentified, and unexplainable. First of all, it smells like hairspray in the kitchen. By my desk, it smells like urine. First I thought the smell was cat- like, which is strange because we usually don't have cats in the office. My dog was accused of it, and she most certainly did NOT pee in here, thankyouverymuch. I wondered fleetingly if the workers peed on my rug at my desk just to be jerks. I just don't know what it is, but I know it makes me fucking crazy.

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This post should prove why I have no shame. I hope you appreciate that I put my tenuous grip on sanity on display for the whole world to see, cause it's all the way out there today. I could have edited this post just so you could have had a laugh retrospectively with me about how I spent the day crawling around and (enthusiastically) sniffing various unsavory things trying to find the source of the pee smell. I had it saved in draft to edit and then publish when I could think straight and the headache from the fumes subsided. But, no I left it out there for you to see.

I'm stupid.

I had Windex poisoning. I have one of those wood laminate (read: cheapo) desks, and you have to dust them with Windex. And honey, I have been dusting what with all the construction going on. It's how I keep my last shred of sanity. Turns out that when you keep a bottle on your desk, the fumes get to your head.

Do you know that I even got to the point where I had my head in all the trashcans sniffing them, and in retrospect that was a bad idea? While doing that I was coming up with all sorts of ways that people were conspiring against me. I decided that the air conditioning man was fed up with the way that I can't look at him or speak to him in more than three syllable sentences because he smells like freon and Old Spice and sometimes B.O. and his last name sounds alllllmost like it is Balljiggler and he put some poisonous fumes into the system and the were pouring out of the vent above my desk. Only I could smell them and they were eating my body from the inside out, I thought. I figured any time now I would get into bed, and not be able to sleep because of a bright glowing nuc-u-lar-ly reactive-type glow like in the movies. I would look down and realize it was my uterus, rendered radioactive by Balljiggler's dastardly plan. Luckily, it was just Windex.

I'm stupid.