Nose Blind or You Stink!

Not terrible long ago I was traveling through Colorado.  I love Colorado!  The people are great “for the most part,” The air is clean “for the most part,” and the terrain is different in that it is flat to the east and mountainous to the west!

Thirty Five miles south of Greeley the pungent odor of dog crap suddenly overwhelmed my senses.  Dog crap is exactly what the odor smelled of but yet I had not been out of the car in a hundred miles or so!

Instinctively I looked at the bottoms of my shoes to find, nothing out of the way there.

I rolled down the window at this point to let the odor out and to my surprise the odor was magnified by thousands.  The smell was so profound that my eyes begin to water.  There was absolutely no excuse that I could find for the odor.  I pressed on hoping that whatever I had passed by on the road would leave as quickly as it began.  No such Luck!

The further I pressed on to the north, the more profound the odor became.

Arriving in Greeley for an early meeting was a task as I was having trouble keeping my stomach in check.

Folks, I have worked in some pretty bad places in my days, including around dead burned bodies.  This was bad!

Here is the rub, when I was able to turn the conversation around to the town and why it stank the person who I was talking to said and I quote “what smell?”

The issue is that one becomes nose blind to the odor.  While it may seem not as bad one day or even hardly noticeable it is not because the odor is any less, it is because the brain tunes it out as normal.

There is theory that it has to do with becoming accustom to your environment and our brains turn off certain signals that would otherwise alert us to some issue as that is a normal odor.

If for example you have animals in your home, you may find that their smells are less objectionable than when you first got them which would indicate that you are doing an OK job at managing their odors.

Surprise, you stink! 

I know several people who have too many animals in their homes and when you go over to their house the smells of the animals about knock you over.  The people don’t understand or appreciate that those very smells bind with the fabric in their clothes and in their hair and when they are out of that environment at work or some other social event, the odor of their home goes with them, and in some cases in advance of them.

Not terribly long ago I was in a restaurant when an elderly couple came in.  As they passed by me the odors of dog overwhelmed the scent of my dinner that was in front of me.  The waitress knew them and in greeting them, seating them etc. she asked about how the dogs were doing?  Did she ask because of the smell or simply because she was being nice?

So not only do you stink but, your house may very well smell badly as well!  Seek your most honest and best of friends to tell you if they smell something out of the way.  It is the kind of friend that would tell you that your zipper was down or you had something in your teeth.   You need to know!

After researching this I began to wonder, does oxygen (o2) have a smell?

I know that o3, Ozone smells so it begs the question what about o2?

I would have to say yes but because we are oxygen breathing creatures that smell has been “nulled” by our brains.  So what it smells like is something we may never know unless we can come up with a “Sniff-o-meter” to tell us if we stink! 

I can actually envision this as a Raspberry Pi project, with some kind of sensor that we currently use to detect gases of different types.  Assign each chemical some sort of value etc…

Can you imagine some sort of device that we blow into, or rub it against our clothes, or hold it in our armpits, while pressing a button to tell us if we stink!?    IT would be nice to have something that would alert you if your house had an odor that you had tuned out as normal.  Shark Tank anyone?

-Best

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