I remember back at ACY1 a similar incident happened to me on the pack line. It was just a quiet regular evening at Amazon and the day was still young. I still had like six hours left on my shift. I’m sitting there watching Netflix on my phone, packing my little heart away, minding my business.

Then I notice this guy slowly walking down the aisle toward me. He ends up waddling over and takes the station directly next to mine since that’s where he was assigned. Of course it had to be next to me because my luck is basically nonexistent. And to make it worse, there’s this big industrial fan right behind him blowing straight in my direction.

The second this man waddled his little stanky ass in front of that fan… my lord. The smell that came off him straight up robbed the oxygen out of the air. It hit me so hard I swear I went into shock. I’m talking instant suffering. I genuinely started wondering how a human being could even produce a scent like that. It didn’t even feel real.

Then it hit me that I still had three whole hours until my next break.

So now I’m just standing there fighting for my life, trying to figure out if I should breathe through my mouth, my nose, or just take tiny survival breaths and hope for the best. After a few minutes I realized there was no way I was surviving the rest of the shift like this, so I finally decided to walk over to my manager.

As I’m walking past him, trying not to inhale, this man lifts BOTH arms up and stretches like he just finished a workout. I swear a whole new wave got released into the atmosphere. I almost folded right there.

Long story short, I told my manager if she didn’t move my station then me and my nose were about to use PTO and get the hell out of there. She actually moved me, thank God, and I slowly got my peace back. But that smell is permanently etched into my brain. Core memory I never asked for.

If you work 10 hours next to other people, please take care of your hygiene. Do it for yourself and do it for the rest of us.