Ewww, that smell….oh no, you didn’t?

I popped in today to talk of a subject you may not want to deal with, it involves the “smell in the room”, not to be confused with an elephant in the room, although sometimes it does smell that way.
I work in a factory where most of the workers are men. Needless to say the gutter/boy talk a lot of times gets a little amusing if not sometimes icky. Today’s conversation revolved around flatulence.

It has been decided by those around me that this is not something that ladies do, which to my mirth caused me to burst into spontaneous laughter. If you ask my husband, he will tell you this is not a true statement. Ladies do in fact pass wind on a regular basis and as we age, it happens more frequently.

There is nothing worse to me than sitting in a room filled with men and feeling that “feeling” of uh-oh….so you hold it till you are ready to burst, or when their long winded conversation finally ends, escape to a private place to expel.
Well this happened today, and being a lady, I left the office to shall we say, expel? Finding a quiet area with no one around is sometimes difficult but can be achieved. So feeling safe it happened. And then of course a minute later here comes a guy walking through. I don’t know if he gave me the “look” or not, I pretended innocence in case the question was to have arisen, which it did not.
I proceed to walk into the office and oh my god, why did I bother, because it seems while the girl is away, the boys will play, and it was not nice. I think the air actually turned a shade of green, or my eyes were just burning so much it seemed that way. They grabbed the can of germ spray; you know the one that is used in bathrooms on the toilet seat. I have read the can. It has been shown to cause cancer in lab rats….poor little rats….but now I am inhaling a cloud of this stuff.

So being adults we discussed this. Would we rather expire from a bad smell or a can of poison? This is where I was told that ladies do not pass wind. So I laughed.
We have a work statement about living our values and as I explained to the boys, by leaving the office to take care of this issue, I have in turn fulfilled four of our values.
Respect….I like you guys too much to subject you to that. I respect you after all
Quality improvement/continuous improvement-the air is much nicer, kind of like daisies right?

Accountability- yep, I did it, but I didn’t do it here for all of you to deal with.
Teamwork-I am the ultimate team player for my actions, right?
It is a tough conversation for the workplace but somehow it came up/or out and we managed to get through it with grace and decorum. I feel more comfortable now because I realize they are just little boys at heart and I can give it along with the best of them. Unfortunately, I don’t have my dogs here in the office so I can’t blame it on them, but I will learn the art of looking around and saying to the crew, ok, which one of you dealt it. With the amount of air they pass, surely it will be believed that it was at least one or two of them. After all, ladies don’t ahem, fart after all.