At the NHM, I used to work with an eccentric, but rather well-to-do and frightfully erudite chap whose diet was almost exclusively Tindaloo curries, crisps, pickled eggs, Guinness and sulphur tablets (“For my health dear boy, I am simply never ill!” And he never was. Indeed he thrives to this day, well into his 90s).
It was a subject for immediate transmission on the dept. grapevine when he visited a toilet for a shit, not only because he presumably had some kind of anatomical mutation that placed his arsehole halfway up his back - or perhaps equipped him with a flicky-flicky tail like that of a hippopotamus - judging by the horrifying mess he left behind in Trap #2…
That was bad. Very, very bad.
But it was the smell. Oh god… The smell…
It was a large building, and for the sake of vital climatic stability it was equipped with a very powerful, dehumidifying, constant fresh-air feed HVAC system that was considered game-changing in its heyday. This, however could do nothing to halt the dense, pungent, almost liquid stench of shit and death and stagnation and putrefaction and swamp and North Sea gas and bad-eggs…
You couldn’t dodge it by breathing through your mouth because you could taste this miasmic hogo - and that was MUCH worse than merely smelling it… The smell would leak from the crapper, fill the bathroom, then pass under the door into the hallway, seep through the double doors and eventually fill the entire floor, as well as climbing up and down the stairwells for a total of 7 floors.
Once word spread, trap #2 would then stay out-of-bounds to all-comers for the next 24 hours. The cleaner assigned to our floor was paid a bonus to clean our toilet because of the state that the pan, seat, floor and walls would be left in. Legend had it that a strike had been called - many years before I arrived in 1992 - until eventually a bonus payment was negotiated to clean that particular bathroom…
Great days.
