Random Crap You Should Know: I Can Hear You

Welcome to a new column on Nightingale’s Folly, which I have chosen to call “Random Crap You Should Know.”  I considered “The Guide to Life If You Have an Extra Chromosome” as well as “If You Don’t Already Know This, Please Die in a Fire,” but I chose the high road.  Plus "IYDAKTPDIAF" is just a little too much.  It also looks like I fell asleep on the keyboard.

For my inaugural installment, I chose a topic that is very near to my heart.  Because I work in a retail pharmacy, I come into contact with a plethora of different people on a daily basis.  My store has a veritable cornucopia of humanity; a populace of individuals, homogenized, and paraded by my counter at a rapid rate.  While there are many traits that set the pleasant people apart from the demonspawn, the most important, nay, vital component of an intelligent human being can be summed up in one word:  deodorant.

If I can smell you before I can see you, we have a problem.  Now, I understand if you’re on your way home from the gym, or the AC is out on your car.  We've all been there, and I am more than happy to make allowances.  However, if you smell like an octopus’s sphincter, you should probably pick up some Speed Stick before gracing us with your presence.  It’s on isle three, between the razors and the condoms, which is great product placement at work, because you need to use the first two if you want to use the third.

My store is on the border between a middle class suburb and the ghetto; a proverbial last chance before crossing the Rubicon into the land of Ford Tauruses (Tauri?) on 32’s.

(Yes, I know it’s an Impala.  I wanted to work in the “Tauri” joke, so shut up.)

This unique placement gives us a very diverse clientele.  Some are intelligent, some are ignorant.  Some are angelic in their demeanor, some make me want to hit them with something large and blunt.  I can (and have) handled the most difficult customers with little problem (it helps that my boss is awesome to the point that he once told an old racist guy "Get the **** out of my drive-through before I beat the osteoporosis out of you".), but the one thing I cannot stand is someone who smells so bad that I can hear their stench.