A drill was boring into my skull while I tried to give the most important presentation of my career, all thanks to the lingering stench of Gary’s baked salmon.
Gary, my coworker, is a “bio-hacker” obsessed with peak performance. His quest for “cognitive optimization” involves a daily lunch of microwaved fish and broccoli.
That smell is a category 5 hurricane for my chronic migraines. My ability to work, to provide for my family, was being held hostage by his quest for omega-3s.
I tried HR. Their solution was a brochure on mindfulness.
When I begged him to stop, just for one day, he patted my shoulder like I was a hysterical child and told me to try meditating.
Gary was so obsessed with hacking his own biology for peak performance, he never imagined that his downfall would come from a fruit banned on public transportation across an entire continent.
The Siege of Cubicle 3B: The Scent of War
My name is Eleanor, and I am a hostage. It’s a temporary condition, lasting precisely thirty minutes a day, but its effects ripple through my afternoons like a toxic shockwave. Five days a week, from 12:15 to 12:45, my cubicle at Sterling Solutions becomes an unbreathable gas chamber. The air, normally a sterile blend of recycled oxygen and cheap coffee, thickens into a soupy, suffocating miasma.
The terrorist’s name is Gary.
Gary is a “bio-hacker.” He wears a fitness tracker that looks like it could double as an ankle monitor and speaks in a dialect of corporate jargon and wellness podcast buzzwords. He believes the key to his professional success, his “cognitive optimization,” is a daily lunch of baked salmon and steamed broccoli. A noble goal, I suppose, if the collateral damage wasn’t my central nervous system.
He microwaves it in the shared kitchen, a small, windowless room down the hall. But the smell doesn’t stay there. It’s an invading army. It marches down the low-pile gray carpet, seeps into the fabric of my cubicle walls, and clings to the back of my throat. It’s a sulfurous, fishy stench that’s both oily and acrid, a scent that whispers of forgotten things rotting at the bottom of the ocean.
This isn’t just an annoyance. I suffer from chronic migraines, a neurological condition that my husband, Mark, lovingly calls my “internal weather system.” And strong, pungent odors are my Category 5 hurricane. Gary’s quest for “peak performance” actively makes it impossible for me to perform at all. My workplace, the place I need to be to provide for Mark and our daughter, Lily, has become a source of physical pain and deep, simmering anxiety.
Collateral Damage
The attack begins subtly. It’s not the smell itself that’s the first sign, but a strange shimmering at the edge of my vision. It’s like looking at the world through a pane of antique, warped glass. This is the aura, the polite warning bell before the sledgehammer hits. My peripheral vision starts to glitter with tiny, dancing zig-zags of light, beautiful in a terrifying way, like a constellation collapsing in on itself.
I close my eyes, pressing the heels of my hands into the sockets. Too late. The first throb starts behind my right eye, a dull, insistent pulse. It’s a deep, boring pain, as if someone is slowly, methodically drilling into my skull. My stomach churns. The words on my computer screen begin to swim, the crisp black letters blurring into an incomprehensible gray soup.
I fumbled for the bottle of Excedrin in my purse, my fingers feeling clumsy and disconnected from my brain. I dry-swallowed two pills, the chalky bitterness coating my tongue. It was a Hail Mary. Most of the time, if I don’t catch it before the aura fades, nothing works. All I can do is ride it out.
Last Tuesday, I had to abandon a project mid-flow, mumbling an excuse to my boss about a “family emergency” before fleeing to my car. I drove home with one eye squeezed shut against the blinding afternoon sun, the pulsing in my head syncing with the rhythmic thump of the tires on the pavement. Mark found me an hour later, curled up in our darkened bedroom with a cold washcloth over my face, unable to speak. Lily, who is only seven, tiptoed in and asked her dad if Mommy was sad. That’s the part that twists the knife. My professional battlefield follows me home, turning me into a casualty in my own family’s life.
The Doctrine of Omega-3
Gary isn’t evil. That’s the frustrating part. He’s just pathologically, almost inhumanly, self-absorbed. He sees the world as a system to be hacked for his own benefit, and other people are just variables in his grand equation. He’s the kind of person who uses the word “synergy” without a trace of irony and leaves books like “The 4-Hour Workweek” on the community bookshelf.
His desk is a shrine to optimization. There’s a blue-light blocking filter on his monitor, a ridiculously ergonomic keyboard split into two alien-looking halves, and a small, burbling water fountain “to promote a calm focus state.” He doesn’t drink coffee; he drinks a murky green concoction he calls his “nootropic elixir.”
Yesterday, he walked over to my desk while I was trying to discreetly massage my temples. He held up a Tupperware container filled with walnuts and goji berries. “Eleanor,” he said, his voice a smooth, condescending baritone. “I’ve noticed you seem a bit frayed lately. You should really consider upping your Omega-3 intake. It’s a game-changer for neural plasticity.”
He looked at the spreadsheet on my screen, a complex budget forecast I’d been wrestling with for two days. “You can’t run high-level cognitive software on junk hardware,” he added, tapping his own temple. It was the most infuriatingly well-intentioned insult I’d ever received. He genuinely believed he was helping, that his fish-fumed wisdom was a gift. He was so wrapped up in his own narrative of self-improvement that he was completely blind to the fact that his “hardware” was poisoning my “software” on a daily basis.
A Plea for Amnesty
I tried the proper channels. I really did. I believe in systems and processes. It’s my job, after all—I’m a project manager. I break down chaos into manageable steps. So, I scheduled a meeting with Brenda from HR.
Brenda’s office is a beige cube of corporate neutrality, decorated with posters of eagles soaring over mountains with words like “SUCCESS” and “INTEGRITY” printed beneath them. She listened with a practiced, sympathetic tilt of her head as I explained the situation—the smell, the migraines, the impact on my ability to work. I didn’t frame it as an attack on Gary. I framed it as a medical issue, a workplace accommodation.
“Well, Eleanor,” she said, folding her hands on her pristine desk. “We certainly want everyone to feel comfortable. However, we can’t really create a policy that polices what people eat for lunch. It could be seen as discriminatory. We have to be inclusive of everyone’s dietary choices.”
“It’s not his choice I have a problem with,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended. “It’s the aggressive, lingering odor. It’s a trigger for a documented medical condition.”
Brenda gave me a placid, unhelpful smile. “Perhaps you could try an air purifier for your desk? Or maybe some essential oils? Lavender is very calming.” She typed something on her computer and a small brochure on “Mindfulness in the Workplace” spooled out of her printer. “This might help with the stress component.”
I walked out of her office with the glossy brochure in my hand, feeling a unique kind of despair. The system had failed. The proper channels were a dead end. Brenda and her soaring eagles weren’t going to save me. I was on my own. And Gary, with his Tupperware of doom, was heading for the kitchen.
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