Food smells

I think I've mentioned before my aversion to food smells. I hate them. I hate cooking bacon in my house so I either (a) go to my mom's to do it or (b) buy the pre-cooked/microwave kind when I need it for a recipe. I won't go to certain restaurants just because I'm afraid of coming home and smelling like that restaurant (like Denny's or a Mongolian grill type place.)

If I had my way, I'd outlaw fajitas. They come out all hot and smoky and that smell just goes everywhere and then you smell like fajitas the rest of the day (and you have to come home, shower, and wash every item of clothing because the smell sticks to everything.) I wish they would either (a) create a fajita section in the restaurant in its own separate, fan-less room or (b) stop making them altogether. This week I went to lunch with my friend who was here from London and he always likes to go to Mexican food. We have been very lucky and he hasn't had to see my fajita-aversion manifest itself on the other two times we've had lunch there this year. Um, until this week.

We're all done with lunch, all paid, just sort of lingering and chatting when all of a sudden, I hear the disgusting sizzling. I say "V, I've gotta go." I jump up, grab my purse and walk quickly in the opposite direction of the waiter carrying the fajitas, which happens to be through the bar. V is calling after me saying "you dropped something" and I look back and he has both my iPod and my cell phone which fell out of my bag as I was getting the heck out of there. But I made it safely out and only smelled a little of food when I got back to the office.

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There's a girl at work who uses our executive kitchen's microwave to make maple flavored oatmeal -- every single day. It is the WORST smell. It smells just fake and gross and it never leaves our office area. People come in all of the time and ask who is having pancakes.

I happened to be in the kitchen one day with the oatmeal girl so I "jokingly" mentioned how nice it would be if she could make her oatmeal in the other kitchen once in awhile to sort of spread the smell around to other areas of the floor. Didn't work -- it was smelly again the next day.

I mentioned my conversation to one of my coworkers and she agreed with me that it was an offensive smell. Another coworker said she was in a meeting in the conference room that has a door that opens to the kitchen and the group in the room kept wondering what that bad smell was in the kitchen. Then one of the vice presidents overheard our conversation, came out of her office and said "I never wanted to say anything but I hate that smell too." So my friend (who works for our group's president) wrote an email to the oatmeal girl's boss this week to ask her to use the other kitchen instead of ours.

Guess what? No disgusting maple smell at work yesterday! Ah, the sweet non-smell of success.