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(I will someday, but not today.)
About a mile east of the Store, there is located one of the largest mushroom farms in the country. It's been there for over 50 years, since when this part of Town was still rural and there was nothing of account out this way but the county dump and a couple of roadside motels and dive bars. It's a significant enough part of the area that the nearby intersection of the Old State Highway and the Old Main Drag was once known as "Mushroom Corner". But time makes fools of us all, and the unstoppable force that is urban sprawl means that this once wooded and sparsely populated area has now been developed all the way out to the edge of the nearby military base, engulfing the mushroom farm in the process.
Mushrooms, of course, are rather fragrant when they're blooming, and they take lots of fertilizer, so mushroom farms have a habit of smelling like a cross between a cow-sty and 3,000 gallons of rancid grease (ask me how I know what that smells like, why don't you.) And that means that on days when the fields are being fertilized and there's an east wind blowing, that aroma is going to waft into our parking lot, and, since our front doors are eastward-facing, some of it is going to get into the front end of the store.
Customers; stop coming at me about this like it's my fault.
Neither I nor anyone else above me in the Store or corporate chain of command have any power to make the smell go away. I didn't tell the mushroom farm to set up there 20 years before I was born. I didn't tell five decades of real estate developers to urbanize this part of the county. I didn't tell the architect that designed this building to face the front doors east. (Blame him or her if you must.) I can't make the wind stop blowing. I can't design, nor can we afford, an air system powerful enough to keep the smell out. I am not Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds, and I cannot summon Zephyrus to blow the offensive aromas back whence they came.
Don't try and tell me it's because we've got rotten food in the Store, either. You can smell the smell long before you get in the parking lot. The whole neighborhood reeks of it on days when the prevailing winds are right. Depending on the wind, you can smell it for miles in any given direction. I honestly don't know how you manage to sell a house to someone in the vicinity as soon as they get a whiff of it. You can smell it while riding the train if the wind is right, even before you've crossed the county line. We didn't do it, we can't do anything about it, PLEASE stop yelling at us.
It's not just your run-of-the-mill customers who don't get it, either. Over a decade ago, before the Store opened, I worked in a fast food restaurant just down the road from where the Store is now. There was a time when the health inspector showed up while I was PIC, and he insisted on taking about twice as long as a typical inspection takes and searching every nook and cranny of the building, because the mushrooms were smelling, and he refused to believe my explanation and insisted that there must be a sewage leak somewhere in the building.
It used to be the Next Town Over that had a reputation for smelling bad because of its paper mills. But now that industry is dead in this country, the mills have all shut down and that town smells just fine, and we're the ones who have to explain to people that it just smells like that sometimes and you'll get used to it.
About a mile east of the Store, there is located one of the largest mushroom farms in the country. It's been there for over 50 years, since when this part of Town was still rural and there was nothing of account out this way but the county dump and a couple of roadside motels and dive bars. It's a significant enough part of the area that the nearby intersection of the Old State Highway and the Old Main Drag was once known as "Mushroom Corner". But time makes fools of us all, and the unstoppable force that is urban sprawl means that this once wooded and sparsely populated area has now been developed all the way out to the edge of the nearby military base, engulfing the mushroom farm in the process.
Mushrooms, of course, are rather fragrant when they're blooming, and they take lots of fertilizer, so mushroom farms have a habit of smelling like a cross between a cow-sty and 3,000 gallons of rancid grease (ask me how I know what that smells like, why don't you.) And that means that on days when the fields are being fertilized and there's an east wind blowing, that aroma is going to waft into our parking lot, and, since our front doors are eastward-facing, some of it is going to get into the front end of the store.
Customers; stop coming at me about this like it's my fault.
Neither I nor anyone else above me in the Store or corporate chain of command have any power to make the smell go away. I didn't tell the mushroom farm to set up there 20 years before I was born. I didn't tell five decades of real estate developers to urbanize this part of the county. I didn't tell the architect that designed this building to face the front doors east. (Blame him or her if you must.) I can't make the wind stop blowing. I can't design, nor can we afford, an air system powerful enough to keep the smell out. I am not Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds, and I cannot summon Zephyrus to blow the offensive aromas back whence they came.
Don't try and tell me it's because we've got rotten food in the Store, either. You can smell the smell long before you get in the parking lot. The whole neighborhood reeks of it on days when the prevailing winds are right. Depending on the wind, you can smell it for miles in any given direction. I honestly don't know how you manage to sell a house to someone in the vicinity as soon as they get a whiff of it. You can smell it while riding the train if the wind is right, even before you've crossed the county line. We didn't do it, we can't do anything about it, PLEASE stop yelling at us.
It's not just your run-of-the-mill customers who don't get it, either. Over a decade ago, before the Store opened, I worked in a fast food restaurant just down the road from where the Store is now. There was a time when the health inspector showed up while I was PIC, and he insisted on taking about twice as long as a typical inspection takes and searching every nook and cranny of the building, because the mushrooms were smelling, and he refused to believe my explanation and insisted that there must be a sewage leak somewhere in the building.
It used to be the Next Town Over that had a reputation for smelling bad because of its paper mills. But now that industry is dead in this country, the mills have all shut down and that town smells just fine, and we're the ones who have to explain to people that it just smells like that sometimes and you'll get used to it.
Everyone wants to eat local, but they don't want to smell the manure that grows that lovely local food do they?
He is my Black Dragon (and yes, a good one) strong, protective, the guardian. I am his Silver Dragon, always by his side, shining for him, cherishing him.
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