workers' comp

I used to work at a small software development company. I was just out of college and jonnynono got me a gig at his place of employment. I was an admin at first and sat at one of 2 front desks.

Anyway it was an awesome place to work and when the developers needed to walk around and let the code stew in their minds or whatever lots of times they would come up to the front desk area to shoot the shit. It was great because I got to know a lot of people that way.

This one day a coder came up to the front desk. He was feeling light-headed and complained of an odor coming from the air vent into his cube. He had a horrible headache and said he thought that some sort of chemical gas or something was in the air vent. This was back in the days when terrorist attacks weren't really the norm in the U.S. so it's not like he thought it was warfare, he thought there was a problem with the building.

We went to his cube with him to sniff around but couldn't really smell anything. He came back up later and he was just distraught, he was all messed up and said I have to go home! I am sick! I am going to need workers' comp!

Keep in mind that this was a funny nice guy, not one of the annoying people. You know how there are always annoying people in an office. This guy was just a quiet dude, coding away most of the time.

So we called Ray, the maintenance manager for our building. We said Ray, we think this guy is a bit bonkers, not that he's making up his illness, however we can't smell this supposed smell. Ray came on over and we went to investigate the guy's cube.

Ray went up into the ceiling and everything, searching for some sort of chemical leak. Nothing. We sniffed all around. Nothing.

Well guess what people. Mr. smart coder had a bag of oranges in his drawer and they went moldy and they were giving off a gaseous smell that knocked Mr. Coder out!

Boy did we have fun giving him a hard time about that! He was really embarassed but later on he let us take a photo of him pretending to be passed out in his cube next to his oranges, and we put the picture in the Christmas party slide show.

p.s. he was a PhD.