On Friday of PT Montreal, I spent the morning chatting with various groups of judges. As I went from group to group, I kept thinking, “Wow – somebody over there is smelling pretty bad for this early in the day….”
After the 3rd or 4th time this happened, I realized the common thread between all these groups: me! Clearly, I stunk, and needed to address it as soon as I could. When I finished helping record draft pics of the featured draft (where I felt a little bad about forcing my smell onto the pod), I told Toby the situation, and that I was going to bounce back to the hotel, take a quick shower and change my clothes.
So I did exactly that, and returned to the venue at the start of Round 1 all fresh and clean….. or so I thought! At the start of Round 2, I was hovering near a table, when I heard the player look at me and make a very audible ‘sniff sniff’ noise. A few seconds later, he made his joke: “Smells like a deck check!”
Part of me wanted to think that was just his joke the whole time, but part of me thought that I hadn’t shaken the smell, somehow. Sure enough, a short while later, I smelled it again. How could this be?? I strained for ideas, until I recalled a morning in Seattle, at WotC headquarters, where I’d been roomming with James Mackay.
There, I had stepped out of the shower, dried off, started getting ready, and realized I stunk somehow. So I got back in the shower, scrubbed vigorously, rinsed off, stepped out, and dried off. Sniff sniff…. what the heck?! I still stink! At that point, I realized it was the towel itself that stunk, so after a THIRD shower, and a different towel… problem solved.
MeSo here I am, back in Montreal, making plans to take yet another shower, but this time – air dry – just in case there was an issue with the towels or I had some unfortunate reaction to their choice of detergent. I was at the front stage, when a judge came up with a vital report from the floor: “There are some players over by table 125 who are complaining about a sewage smell coming up from the floor, and are asking if they can move.”
A sewage smell… from the floor… OH MY GOD, I DON’T STINK!!! It was a huge weight off my shoulders. I spent the next few minutes researching the sewage smell, and traced it a pipe of some sort running across the entire room, just under the floor. Its location was consistent with where I’d been smelling it, and we were now at least able to identify the problem.
After reporting the issue to show management, they were able to call people from the venue to address the problem, which was done by:
- Pouring some crazy chemicals down under the floor
- Putting some big boards over areas of the floor
- Taping up some seams in the floor
- Extremely generous use of orange-scented air sanitizer
And that, my friends, is how I learned to hate orange-scented air sanitizer.
Article of the year for 2013, for sure. 😛