Grotesque at it's Best

[FenigDurak]

With apologies to those who might have found that offensive, I actually had someone tell me this, over the comic book called The Authority.

Excellent book. The relationship between Apollo and Midnighter in there is actually very well done. So people who rip on it have obviously not read it all the way through. Granted, I haven't read up on the latest stuff since Jenny Sparks bit it.

I used to work in a small comic book shop. I, fortunately, never had that horrible of an experience when I was work. After leaving the shop though, I've had a few questionable ones.

I'll also toss in a chime or two on cons. I've both attended and worked Dragon Con. As an attendee, I had a CHOICE in who I hung around with. Which meant I could walk away from the bad ones. As a volunteer, I HAD to deal with the gross, unbathed, creepy few.

Starfest in Denver, while it's growing, in my experience is still pretty clean. There are enough people who have been around long enough to the point that they don't care who they offend with honesty. We've either converted them, or scared them away. In a few cases, all it took was wrinkling my nose and holding my hand beneath my nose (picture an 18th Century French Fop with his lacy hankie under his nose)

[Brightglaive]

Sink me, m'dear!! The stench was deplorable!!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I've been to very few comic book conventions. But my wife will tell you that for gross people you need to go to a model railroad show. I have to agree. Some of the fattest, smellest people I have come across have been at model railroad shows. I have a booth at local shows as part of a model railroad club. And the model railroad show is the only place I have seen guys in miniskirts!

[Delphae]

I go to Connecticon every year and everyone there is nice and clean. Very few stinky folks.

[Dreamstalker]

The game store I used to work in had a few winners in the bathing=evil department. Last summer, it seemed as if most of them knew which week of our 90+ heat wave the AC was broken, and chose then to grace me with their *gag* presence. Unfortunately, even if I had been allowed/able to escape there was nowhere to escape to

(why is it that the stinkier the person, the harder they try to get in your face and talk your ear off?)

[Imogene]

And the model railroad show is the only place I have seen guys in miniskirts!

Pssh! Check out any Rocky Horror shadow cast grouping. They'll be out en force.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Pssh! Check out any Rocky Horror shadow cast grouping. They'll be out en force.

Yes, but there it is expected.

[XCashier]

We had a woman in the office, who must have been allergic to water and hygiene. She would wear the same clothes two or three days in a row, didn't bathe, didn't use deodorant, or any of that fancy, high falutin city folk ways.

She sat three cubes down from me, and she's been gone for a year now, and I can still smell the funk of where she used to sit. No one has been placed in that cube since she left, after they opened up her drawer and found about five sandwichs in various stages of decay, and random other bits of past lunches growing their own civilizations.

Ewww. She must be the wife of Funkstain. Or sister. Possibly both.

I just don't understand people like that. It's not like soap and shampoo are that expensive.

[Rattslinger]

I was at the shop a couple of weeks ago, and one of the guys who is a regular, I'll call him "Steve" walked into the store. This is about 7pm, Steve works in an office and is a very, very clean individual. I kinda smelt a little weirdness from him as he walked past me, but when he opened his backpack to retrieve his wallet, the funk hit me full on in the face.

Apparently, there had been a comic signing earlier that day, in July, in Arizona, at one in the afternoon. There was a line of guys of various ages, and cleanliness levels winding through the store, out the front door and about two blocks down the shopping center.

Steve had ducked himself in to say hi to one of the artists that he knew from his school days (not gonna say who), and he nearly lost his cookies because of the stench. Steve left in a hurry, and headed back to work, he keeps a spare change of clothes in his work cubicle and his office has a shower in their gym.

This was six hours later, after a shower and a change of clothes and Steve himself still smelt slightly funky, his clothes that had came into contact with the funk for about a minute smelled like they had been soaking in the stink for days.

Steve washed those clothes three times and they still are slightly funky, he had to throw the shoes away that he was wearing because he couldn't get the funk out of them.

[NightWatch]

*gagvomitgag* Rattslinger, back in May you posted about how you thought the people who lacked hygiene so badly may suffer from Bipolar Disorder. I ran into a similar situation around a year ago. I went to a large music event and this random guy who was way too old for me started hitting on me. Of course I shot him down and didn't put any more thought into it. But I did remember him saying he was all fancied up cuz he was supposed to get to see his daughter that day.
I ran into him outside a coffee shop around a week later, he was wearing nasty scrubby clothes that were slightly inadequate for the weather, he was filthy and stinky. I definately recognized him and he walked over to ask me for spare change. So I asked him if he recognized me at all and it took him probably 5 mins before he connected the dots.
Anyway, it really weirded me out to see someone change so drastically in only a few days. Creepy for sure.

[Dreamstalker]

Andara, I hear ya about the Magic players...the Game Store gets a lot of those, and never was I more disgusted than the nights when I had been roped into working the weekly tournaments.

The anime group that should not be (points for trying to make a social event work with a bunch of extremely nonsocial people*, but it still fails) has one or two members who see the stinky-otaku stereotype as a badge of honor.

*to illustrate, most people who meet me call me shy, and on meeting nights I'm by far the most social person in the room

[Canarr]

A couple of years ago, our Media Markt outlets (equivalent to BB or CC) had a special: no VAT on all products. Since that was 16% at the time, of course, the stores were packed. I went there with my brother to look at some video games we'd been meaning to get, so we headed straight for that section.

The smell started as we approached the X-Box aisle. It was unwashed body and unwashed clothes and wet dog and... brrrr. We exchanged a look, swallowed, walked the remaining five-six steps and turned the corner into the aisle. There was one guy standing there, looking at the games, and we immediately turned around and left the aisle again. Up close, the stench was so bad, you couldn't even stand there. We waited a few minutes for the guy to leave, then another five minutes, before we went back. The smell was down from overwhelming to merely disgusting by then, but still very, very present.

Back in the army, there was an officer on our floor who had poor hygiene; you could tell that he was in his office from the end of the corridor, just from the smell, but even he wasn't as bad as that guy. I still don't get how someone could tolerate smelling so bad.

[Rattslinger]

What gets really irritating about the situation is when some of these guys have a genuine problem with cognition. You really want to say something, or do something, but when the guy has Asperger's Syndrome, you really can't say anything, because it's not really their "fault" but it's still maddening to deal with.

However, I despise these guys who know they have an issue and use it to get away with whatever behavior they feel they can.

[Evil Queen]

Hey, Dreamstalker, not all Magic players are stanky. I myself play magic and in the game store I played in (for years and years) the other players always had good higeine. The owners (mark and Micheal) would boot out the stanky players and tell them to come back after showers that involved SOAP.

Very few gaming geeks are the stereotypical stanky jerks. Please don't lump the good ones in with the bad.

[Dreamstalker]

Sorry, EQ (I meant to clarify that the MtG players that frequent my local store are the stanky ones, when I was actively playing the hygiene bar seemed higher as the gamers in my school were trying to get a mainstream club started)

What gets really irritating about the situation is when some of these guys have a genuine problem with cognition.

The anime group I spoke of is held by a local Asperger's group for the purpose of working on social skills--on some level it does not work, possibly because almost everyone has the same level of social ineptness and there's only one "handler". I could be considered a Aspie yet tend to get annoyed with the stinkier attendees (as well as the ones who talk over whatever anime is being shown) very quickly.