ONBOARDING / 01 / THE SMELL
internal documentation from Product Classification: a scent complaint with no clear point of origin
May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
The box had been Karen’s problem since Tuesday, which meant Genny had stopped thinking about it by Wednesday morning, the way you stop thinking about anything that has been moved to someone else’s cube.
She came in at 7:58. She put her coat on the back of her chair. She set her coffee on the left side of the desk, away from the docking station. She opened her notebook to the page she had left off on, which was Tuesday’s running list of catalog entries pending review.
The notebook smelled like flowers.
She had not noticed it at first. She had opened the notebook the way she always did, without looking at it, and had started reading her own notes before her brain caught up to what her nose had already registered. She paused. She closed the notebook. She opened it again.
There it was. Not strong. Not unpleasant. Faintly sweet. Faintly floral. The kind of smell you got from a hand cream sample, except it was not on her hands, it was on the paper.
She lifted the notebook to her face and inhaled, which she immediately regretted because Blake had just stood up from his cube two over and could see her doing it. She lowered the notebook. Blake did not look. Blake was looking at Karen, who was at the far end of the floor correcting someone.
Genny set the notebook down on her desk.
She thought about the box. The box had been on her desk for about forty minutes Tuesday morning before Karen had pushed it to her own cube with her foot. It had smelled like this. She had noticed it at the time. The notebook had been on the desk next to the box.
That was the chain of events. The notebook had picked up the smell from the box. That was a thing that happened, with strong scents. Her grandmother’s house had smelled like cedar for forty years because of one closet.
She got up. She went to the bathroom. She washed her hands, even though her hands were not the issue. She did this because it felt like the kind of thing that should help.
She came back. She opened the notebook. It still smelled like flowers.
By Thursday she had decided to ignore it.
