At work we all have on-on-one meetings with the boss to review our progress and upcoming activities. This Friday (December 17th) I had a perfectly normal meeting with my boss, until he said that he had a personal and rather sensitive matter to bring up. "Uh, oh", I thought. Here it comes.

I figured it would have to do with my resistance to our lab's standardization on many Windows-only tools because of my love for the Macintosh platform. I'd been working on my attitude, so I was ready to discuss how I'd been trying to become a better team player. Yadda yadda.

What he said next took me to a whole other dimension - another time and place, and perhaps even a different planet. Several of my co-workers - "more than one or two" - had approached him and said that I smelled bad, enough so that they found it distracting. In particular, I smelled sweaty, like I'd just worked out.

I just sat there for a second trying to process this almost unfathomable piece of information. I shook my head and just stared at him, as if to say "You have to be kidding.". I queried him further on the matter, and he insisted it was not just one or two people. Obviously it bothered them enough to come to him. He'd suggested that they approach me themselves, but they could not.

We talked a little more about it, but I was in a state of shock. This was truly one of the most bizarre conversations I had ever had with my boss, or with most other people. Naturally, he could not reveal these people's identities. But I figured it was most likely to be people who worked closely with me, which would include the other developers.

I told him I'd do what I could, and went back to my office. Unfortunately, this issue had me by the throat - I could not concentrate, no matter how I tried, on getting any productive work done. Who could these people be? Did I really smell that bad? I was not aware of having body odor. No one had ever said anything of the sort before.

I called my friend (and one of the "lead team" members) into my office and asked her whether she was one of these people. She said that she definitely had smelled sweat on me, but hadn't complained to the boss. We talked about odors at length, and I asked her several times about the history and nature of this supposed odor.

I was madly trying to think about all the possible causes of this odor. What frightened me was that I was not aware of smelling bad. I knew that sometimes I sweated at work, and could smell the sweat myself, but I had never given it much thought. I'd have preferred that I had not sweated so noticeably, but it had never occurred to me that it could be a problem worthy of report to the boss.

After my friend left my office, I began sending email, individually, to my friends and to people in the developer group and lead team to ask them whether they had gone to the boss, or if not, whether they'd noticed a smell. In all, I sent mail to fifteen people and spoke with five.

Almost immediately, one of our project managers came into my office, and we discussed the issue at length. She said she had smelled me so often that she'd simply come to associate the sweaty smell with me. She could smell me as we passed in the hallway, and had smelled me when we'd met in her office. She said many things to indicate that she understood that I'd consciously taken a "natural" approach (i.e., no deodorant), but that in this culture, that wasn't accepted. What it boiled down to, as far as I could tell, was that whether or not she "understood", it bothered her. But she denied speaking to the boss about it.

So, of the people I spoke to directly, my boss said he didn't notice a smell; my co-worker friend did; my husband Ian was just as baffled as I was; the project manager was "understanding" but bothered; and the developer I've worked most closely with had noticed, and it sometimes bothered him.

Slowly, email started coming back in response to my queries. One co-worker/friend said he could smell me, but that he liked it - it was a turn-on. A friend wrote back saying that he couldn't smell me. By the next day, I had responses from fourteen people. Only five admitted to having noticed a smell, which left nine who had not.

I had not received replies from six others, two of whom were personal friends. I was really beginning to wonder who the (at least) three people who'd complained could be. Only two developers had not replied, and only one developer who did reply had experienced the odor, but had not spoken to the boss.

From my list of people who'd not yet replied, I had some very unlikely suspects. I could only think of one who would have been likely to have complained. That meant that there must have been non-developers who'd complained, assuming that everyone else who'd answered had been honest (and I had no reason to believe that they hadn't).

I began to think that the people I would not hear back from would be the people who'd gone to the boss. As painful as the experience had been for me (I'd felt completely ganged up on and utterly humiliated), it must have been pretty embarrassing to have to admit to me that they'd gone behind my back and complained to the boss about such a sensitive issue.

I also began to think that it was remotely possible that one or more of those who'd said they'd smelled me but hadn't gone to the boss were not being completely honest. It seemed like a real long-shot, but I could see this being true of one of them. She's known within the group to be a conniver.

As the "nope, haven't smelled 'ya" messages poured in, I began to feel better, and it seemed pretty clear that some people just have a keener sense of smell that others. Almost everyone who wrote back saying they couldn't smell me also said something like "Well, I'm probably not a good one to ask; I don't think my sense of smell is as good as other people's.".

But for all of Friday, I could never quite shake the feeling of having entered a traumatic alternate reality. Saturday morning I felt a hell of a lot better.

In the mean time, I'd spent a fair amount of time on Friday thinking about the possible causes for people being able to smell me, and the obvious things I could do to change this. At first I thought about only changing one thing at a time so I could isolate what was wrong. But as I thought of things, I realized that many of them could be culprits, and it just made sense to change all of them at once.

But what really started to bug me was that these people did not come forward, but went behind my back; and that, since I didn't care one whit if I smelled sweaty from time to time, it was annoying to have to make a lot of behavioral changes considering that the people who had a problem appeared to be largely in the minority. Also, it really bugged me that this had only come out now - after about three years (the project manager I'd talked to said she could smell me for about that long, and not before).

So I will do what I can to ensure that I don't smell sweaty at work. And I am still waiting to hear from the remaining people at work whom I emailed. I may need to begin emailing other people in the group with whom I have little contact (meaning that it seems really unlikely that they'd have complained) if I really want to know who spoke up.

If I hear back from enough of those who haven't yet replied and they say they hadn't smelled me, or that they did, but hadn't spoken to the boss, then I'm going to have on my hands some co-workers who are not being honest with me. That would be really disturbing.

But I am looking forward to the day when I can just laugh about this whole thing. On Friday, when this first came out, I was predicting it'd be a year before I could laugh. Today, Saturday, as I write this, I'm thinking it's going to be a lot sooner.

Sunday: Well, today I laughed about the matter while recounting it to a friend who had once had a similar but worse problem. In her case, when she was still teaching, a classroom full of "troubled" teens told her over and over to her face that she had bad breath. This made my problem sound comparatively minor! And it helped me to be able to laugh about this. Especially when I confided in her about some of my more stink-causing habits!