
Over six months ago, Melissa used to sit at Yolanda (the terminal nearest the hallway) and complain that everyone would come to the nice "client bathrooms," directly across said hallway, to do their business. Which meant the Tape Room always smelled it. Also, with the upstairs (HR, corporate) kitchen directly above us, all their microwaved-popcorn and burnt-coffee smells trickled down our way, too. Basically with our hefty A/C keeping a room full of machines a steady 69 degrees all the time, we were sucking in everybody's odors, and the worst of it was their poop smells.
About three months ago, give or take, we started to notice in earnest that a Poop Smell was around that wasn't from the bathrooms -- it's easy to test that, you walk into the bathroom and see if it smells worse than the Tape Room. We began to call Facilities and they would come in. Sometimes it wouldn't smell anymore, but sometimes it would. Either way, all they could do was begin the arduous task of seeing where the ventilation was coming from and where it wasn't. The upstairs bathrooms, the client bathrooms, a small half-height storage space midway up the stairs known as the Hobbit Hole... each one was ruled out, reconsidered, ruled out again. The Smell lingered, and in fact undeniably grew steadily worse.
Three weeks ago Melissa left for a three-week stint as assistant editor at the Sundance Institute, leaving me as ad hoc Editorial Coordinator and in charge of the Tape Room. Dave Drusky, former video engineer and friend who'd been laid off in the big Requiem-For-
J&B Layoff of '09, came in to be Travis while I was Melissa.
Early last week the smell was so bad we could barely stand it. By Tuesday afternoon we were actually gagging, and when a director came in to request a Digibeta dub of his short film, the levels had spiked. The three of us were driven to the hallway, where the smell was merely foul, and the director complained immediately of a sore throat. (Not like we were getting sick from it, but honestly, it was
bad.)
Yeah, right, so the above picture is a bit of a spoiler to the story I admit, but on Tuesday we shut down several hours early. Dave was sent home and I wandered the halls trying to do my job from outside my room (limited or no access to the files, the compressing machines, or the scheduling computer). Eventually I too went home early. Plumbers and air experts ("industrial hygienists") were called, appointments were made. Promises of action. No more runaround, no more passive suggestions that it's not as bad as all that.
I spent three days working from a cubicle in the Production Prairie, amongst the coordinators and PR guys (very cool people, actually). I only went in the room when I had to, and I had the above respirator fitted with organics-filters to protect me when I did. I literally sat at my desk, plugging away at DVD or Quicktime compression, with a gas mask on. That's right.
The Smell at that point seemed to have exhausted all its potential poopiness (which, man, was a lot) and evolved into what I called a propane, gas-leaky smell. Sour, with a bit of a poop aftertaste. (Try working in an environment where that phrase gets used seriously, and you'll understand why I had a gas mask on.)
So anyway. The plumber came, something like three or four hours late (during my lunch break, so I didn't get to talk to him), and when he showed the smell was so mild (admittedly, it comes and goes) that he couldn't do anything for us but come back the next day, I was told. The industrial hygienist showed up, took readings, that same day after I'd gone home. The next day when the plumber came back they discovered a cracked pipe above the scheduling office (basically one corner of the Tape Room) that ran
to the client bathrooms. I'm assured that sewage did not run in this pipe, only "a trickle of greywater," which Wikipedia says is "distinct from blackwater in the amount and composition of its chemical and biological contaminants (from feces or toxic chemicals)." But you know what? Either greywater smells like blackwater, or fumes backed up along with that trickle and came out the pipe, or that water wasn't as grey as everyone thinks. One way or another, now that the pipe's been sealed, it's significantly easier to be at work, and I've given the art department back their respirator.
Every once in a while we have to pause and smell, convinced we got a phantom whiff of something amiss in the air, but for the most part we are okay again. A little leaked ("grey," ugh) water damage to the walls and some of Melissa's paperwork in the Scheduling Office, hence cleaned up (and leaving the paperwork unpleasantly gray and crusty) and some memories and jokes about The Poop Smell are -- we fucking hope -- all that remains of the entire ordeal.
And that is the story of the lingering smell of poop, and what I've been suffering through for months.
