Smelling like a tart's hankie

The title of this post is paraphrasing a line uttered by Sean Connery in the James Bond film "Diamonds are Forever". It's all tied up with the gay assassins who were trying to kill him favouring an apparently tacky cologne. I bring it up now because I've been assaulted by the automatic deodoriser in the toilets at my workplace.

Like many workplaces, the toilets here feature a stink-reduction machine that sends out a spray of deodoriser at regular intervals. This is fine in principle (who wants to be subjected to the smell of stale shit?) but several aspects of the implementation are less than perfect. The most common thing I have noticed in these machines is how bad the perfume used smells. While it's arguably better than human waste, it's still pretty awful. Not that I've spent a lot of time in cheap brothels but this to me is the archetypal cheap brothel smell. I only go to expensive high-class brothels.

The second problem with this deodoriser is its location. It's right above the sinks where you wash you hands (regular readers will know how important I think it is to wash your hands) and it's far too close to where you stand. So much so that it sprays the perfume directly on you if you are standing there when it has one of its regular stench eruptions. I made this even worse by timing my turn away from the sink so that I was facing directly into it when it sprayed.

So I staggered away from the sink, hardly able to breathe because I'd inhaled the spray and almost blind because it hit me in the eyes. I stumbled out the door rubbing my eyes and swearing, almost bumping into a cow-orker which resulted in the following conversation:

Cow-orker: What's the matter with you?

Me: I got spray on me

Cow-orker: You should be more careful, at least you're wearing dark trousers.

Me: No, not my pants, it got in my eyes.

Cow-orker: What the hell were you doing in there?

Me: No, I was at the sink and did it.

Cow-orker: WHAT?

Suffice to say, the conversation degenerated at this point. For some reason, it's impossible to rescue the situation once you mention getting spray on you in the toilets.