The Smell

I am not trying to pass myself off as a Seinfeld fan or anything. In fact, I don't think I've ever watched a whole episode all the way through. There's something about hearing the same joke over and over again for a whole 30 minutes that just looses me after 10 at the best.

I do seam to remember an episode about a smell though, a smell so bad that no amount of washing can rid the world of it. A smell that clings to everything that it comes into contact with and follows people around to haunt them like so many ghosts of Christmas whatever.

The hallway in my apartment building has been infected with such a demon smell.

At first I thought it was just me being, ya know, my pregnant and over dramatic self, after all, Das Piper didn't need to hold his nose and run from front door to apartment door, and as far as I could tell, neither did any of my neighbours.

But now my smeller is starting to calm down, I can open the pantry without gagging from the smell of canned goods, I can be in the same room as someone drinking a coffee, I can go to the grocery store, and even use my own shampoo!

With all of these good signs from the smell world, I decided to take on a chore that I had recently been leaving to Das Piper as to minimize my exposure to the hallway of smelly doom.

I did the laundry.

I stood at the closed door of my apartment for a long time, basket of dirty towels and the laundry detergent in one arm, my other hand on the door knob, mentally following the path I would take from there to the laundry room.

I got about four steps before I started gagging. I had to grab my nose and complete the loading of the washing machine, opening and pouring of the detergent, and the counting of the change, with one hand while my other one squeezed my nostrils shut and my mouth gasped for breath. (I swear the smell is so bad I can taste it too)

When I got back from the laundry room I heaved a sigh of relief, Moving like I always do to the balcony door to breath in some fresh air. That's when it hit me. The Smell wasn't gone, I could still smell it, and I was still gagging. It was attached to me, It was clinging to my sweater like a freaking baby koala bear!

I managed, half an hour later, to switch the load from washer to dryer, and an hour after that get the laundry back to the apartment. . . But it took an hour of scrubbing and two hair washes before the smell finally left me.

I've lived in apartments before, and I've experienced some pretty funny smells outside of neighbour's doors when they're cooking. Not to mention the musty wet smell that every lobby or entry has in the winter when boots track in snow and dirt and salt and sand from the streets. And there was the idiot on the second floor of my last apartment who never cleaned their cat's litter box. But this smell is something else. This smell is like something crawled under the carpet and died there. This smell should be harnessed by the military to be used against enemies or some such thing. This smell is just plain heinous in any and every way you can imagine.

I just wish I knew how to get rid of it so that I could demand the building manager do so.