The HR Lady nervously approached my desk, meekly asking me to join her in the interview room. All week long we had been parading potential new employees through and never had I been asked to get involved. But something in her eyes and in her voice told me this was important. As I walked the short distance to the room, I imagined stepping into a police interrogation room to play mind games with someone, or having to physically remove someone else who had become disruptive. But walking into the room, I knew immediately why she had brought me here so desperately: this place was staaaaaanky.
They had just interviewed a man* who had left more than his resume behind. As I crossed the threshold to the interview room, my head jerked back like a boxer ducking a jab as I was confronted with an almost visible plume of stench. It was an atmospheric change, like heavy humidity during a Midwestern summer, a rankness that reached out and touched you. They had noticed the smell on the man* immediately. But now that the man was gone, his B.O.** was thriving within our office.
But while the smell was strong, it wasn’t gross or particularly “bad.” It didn’t remind us of unbrushed morning mouth or stale urinal cakes; it smelled oddly mechanical. It was like the confined inner depths of a photocopier or the unseen trenches of a car motor. Not fuel-like, but slightly reminiscent of smokiness or heat. It was almost the stink not of a machine, but of an actual mechanical process, like the friction between a ball and socket.
We had interviews coming in all day, and people couldn’t think our office just smelled like the inside of a lawnmower and the rest of us were okay with it. As we cracked open emergency fire windows to air out the room (it WAS an emergency), and sprayed air freshener like paranoid smokers, I began to think about the causes of this redolence. I racked my brain trying to remember any of my high school chemistry (or was it physics?) on the nature of gasses and when the gasses became ghosts that stalked humans and suffocated them. Then I settled on a more scientific, reasonable explanation: he was a robot.
Maybe not. But maybe? We are now seeing tech companies experimenting with internet-based AI, maybe this was a first generation real world prototype? Truthfully, you can’t help but feel a little bad for the guy. Living with a stank every day causes one to get used to it, to forget about it. I hope he found a job somewhere despite it (or because of it).
So on your next interview, remember to Odorize for the Job You Want. This guy would have fit in quite well with the oncoming cyborg revolution but he wasn’t right for our company, partially because he stank like a rusty traveling carnival ride.***
*May have been a robot.
**Might not have been a human body.
***It was also a smell of sort of a sweaty drill press.
