The Worst Part About My Job

Worst part of my job? [smith]It's the smell.[/smith] Food processing inevitably means bleach fumes, which are bad enough. (My personal hell? Drowning in a lake of bleach.) My workplace is located in the basement of an enormous old six-story warehouse that contains several businesses. The bulk of the warehouse is used to store various dry chemicals in enormous one-ton bags. Mostly they're cattle-feed additives: powdered zinc, antioxidants, etc. These substances give off a stink that is difficult to describe. Metallic but organic. It smells like some thing people aren't meant to smell, like death by respiratory disease. I've brought people down there to give them a tour and always watch their faces as the smell punches them in the nose. "Oh my god!" The first floor is the worst, the gauntlet from the front door to the basement, and it fades almost entirely once you've gotten down to the basement itself.

And the smell clings. I've had to run down there in the afternoon, just a quick sprint from the front door to the basement and back again and in that short amount of time, I've gotten back in the car and my clothes and skin are fucking permeated. In the summer, the smell intensifies, is given substance by the heat and humidity (building is too big and old for any kind of climate control to be feasible.)

Again, once down in the basement itself, the smell is barely noticeable. If I stand by one of the elevator shafts, I can smell it drifting down. But it's there. I leave work every day smelling like I've been pitchforking the damned back under their chemical bath. And the worst part of all is that I think I've gotten used to it.