I’d never thought of my keen sense of smell and adverse reaction to many perfumes as a disability until I went to work in a crowded call center. Before then, I’d been able to avoid the worst: at the community college, when I asked the students to avoid coming to class reeking of scent, they complied, because, as a teaching assistant, they respected me, even if I didn’t grade their essays.
The call center was a different story. I was one among twenty-five phone agents, mostly women, who lacked empathy. I realized when a migraine set in by noon every day and a hoarse throat shortly ensued that I had to do something about the high level of allergens in the room. For a time, thinking that if I made friends among my coworkers they’d help me out, I pushed my introverted self to try to connect with them. I failed.
One day I was in the middle of a client call when Fran reached behind my back to offer Sue in the cubicle to my right a sniff of “this pear lotion I just love.” I froze. The odor made my mind go blank. As I pushed back my chair to interrupt them, they were taken aback. I made excuses to my client and said I’d call back as soon as possible.
I held back tears until I was able to reach the HR office on the other side of the building. I knocked on the door, and as I entered, the flood broke. HR handed me a tissue and gestured for me to sit down. I told her about my symptoms, and how when I’d asked those nearby to not slather on the perfumed hand lotion so often because it made me sick, they didn’t care. I explained that my team leader and I had an agreement that I could take a walk outside the building if I needed to escape the indoor air pollution. I was miserable but did not want to look for another job.
Empathetic because her mother had had to quit work because of exactly these issues, HR had already been trying to take the company fragrance-free. In the meantime, she said that I should see my doctor for some kind of statement about my allergies, so that we could invoke the Americans with Disabilities Act. My first reaction was reluctance. Was it shame? Anger that I had to identify as disabled in order to get help?
“Is this really a disability?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s not normal.”
“I can’t just go to the doctor tomorrow. Is there something I can do now?”
She asked me to document what and how often I smelled odors, so we could have a better idea of the volume in the room and the problems they caused me.
“Try putting a bowl of ground coffee on your desk. It’ll absorb odors.”
As I walked out the door, she added, “And, you can sniff ground coffee to clear smells out of your nose. That’s what they do at perfume counters.”
It was worth a try. Over the following days, I angled a small fan to blow against the most obnoxious scents and placed a bowl of coffee in the corner behind my monitor. I’d hunted in a discount store for the cheapest coffee I could find since it didn’t really matter what kind, and then I realized I could get free ground coffee from the break room. I brought a vial of whole coffee beans from home and kept it in my desk drawer. When disturbed by an odor, I’d get out the vial, uncork it, and inhale. It worked like magic to eliminate the odor, but not before it had already triggered an allergic reaction. Better than nothing.
Once, I grabbed the vial and took a desperately deep inhale and started to snuffle sneeze. I’d forgotten that I’d swapped out the whole beans for fresh-ground coffee that was now snuff and up my nose. I grabbed a tissue and headed for the bathroom on the other side of the building. It was the least used one, so the least soap-smelly in general. I hoped no one had noticed that I had a coffee maker on my face.
The unfortunate aspect about allergen prick tests is that they cannot test for perfumes, in part because perfumes are combinations of scents. Over the years, I’d discovered that eucalyptus, heavy florals like peony and gardenia, and the chamomile so popular in herbal teas were an assault. In my new job, I added baby powder, artificial coconut, and chlorine bleach-based cleaning wipes to my catalog of misery.
A few times I took non-drowsy allergy medicine and still nodded off at my desk in the afternoon. I was wary and unwilling to make a habit of this, in part because of suspicions about my mother’s antihistamine use and its potential link to the Alzheimer’s disease that was stealing her from me day by day.
Some weeks later after I’d turned in my log and doctor’s statement, HR and the team leader did a desk audit and asked employees to take home the worst offenders. If I’d ever planned to have cordial coworker relationships, the looks I got from them dashed any hope because I’d desecrated their aromatherapy rituals.
One day Sue turned to me, motioning to the lavender mini bouquet I had on my desk, “You like the smell of lavender. Why doesn’t that bother you? I wouldn’t like it if it made me sick.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know why some perfumes make my nose run and others don’t. It’s not something the doctors can test for.”
“So, we just have to believe what you say?”
Another shrug.
I wasn’t prepared for the blowback that came again and again in small petty acts, like moving things on my desk while I was in the lunch room or offering treats to others around me but not to me. Muttered rude comments.
Another day, Sue spat, “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you ask to work from home?”
Without even bothering to look at her, I said, “I did ask. They said no.”
Truth. They hadn’t even wanted to move me to another cubicle when I’d suggested that. What were upper management expecting, that everyone else would want to segregate?
The day after Fran went around the room spraying perfume from an atomizer, I let my team leader know that I was going to file a harassment complaint. Not long afterward, Fran was moved to another department. That they’d had to promote her to move her seemed unjust, but at least she was gone. I was moved into her empty cubicle by the window in the corner away from the bullies.
The corner was a great place to be until our expanding team moved into another building with a hand sanitizer station at each doorway. I held my breath whenever I crossed the room. Cubicle wipe downs could only be done the last five minutes of the shift, with the non-chlorine bleach wipes the company provided.
Though the pettiness continued in fits and spurts, it was mostly manageable. With a high turnover rate, there were always new hires who had to be educated about the fragrance rules, but that was the team leader’s job. One day as I turned a corner, I overheard Sue warning a new hire that she should stay away from me, the troublemaker. I didn’t really care that much because I didn’t need a coworker tribe because my tribe had long been made up of family and friends living all over the country.
A year later, COVID-19 came on the scene, and suddenly the department was issued laptops and sent home to work. In place of the daily dose of perfume pettiness, the pandemic caused its own paranoia of airborne particles. My anxiety about Covid and cytokine reactions by overactive immune systems was counterbalanced by working in my fragrance-neutral home. To be able to control the temperature, the light, the air quality, the music—what perks! A non-commute on winter roads! I never wanted to go back to the office, and I didn’t go back. Instead, I put my better health and the time and energy not wasted on office drama to good use, and when word came down that we’d be permanently work-from-home, I couldn’t stop smiling.
