Blessed by the Potato

The bathroom here at the hospital has rather poor ventilation and tends to smell a little more strongly than your typical public washroom. Sometimes it smells strongly of cleaning products, whatever turns the toilet water blue, and disinfectant (especially at night, when it usually gets cleaned, and when I’m really the only one left around to use it; I, somewhat unfairly, have a near-total monopoly on the odd magic of turning that toilet water solution green). Other times, as one might expect, it smells foully of other people’s waste products.

Today, it smelled like fried chicken.

That kind of threw me for a loop when I first walked in there, because there really aren’t any cleaning products on the market that the caretaking staff could possibly have switched to that might smell like that (oranges, lemons, “springtime”, and bleach, yes, but I’ve yet to see “fried chicken scented Lysol”). And no matter how little one’s digestive system may be acting on food, there’s simply no way it could come back out (either end) still smelling so much like fried chicken. The mystery of the odd, out of place smell was enough to make me start to wonder if I might be having a stroke, though worrying about whether I’m having a stroke seems to be my default state these days, particularly when strange smells are involved. Eventually the logical explanation hit me: all around that washroom are labs where no one is allowed to eat. The people who work there usually have to eat out in the hallway, sitting on the floor (and even have to leave their food sitting out there unattended, like the wet snowboots of so many kindergarteners). So of course, if one is just a little bit crazy and wants something approximating a chair to sit on and eat lunch, there’s really only one seat in close proximity…

But if it were me, I’d try the cafeteria. They have tables there, too.