He has stuff hanging all over his belt, so I ask what he does. Upon hearing he works for the gas company, I tell him a funny story.
I once reported a gas leak. The guy came out, waved his little electronic nose, and said all was well. As the devices are calibrated to accept a certain base level of gas, I asked him to turn it down. Still nothing. I begged for one more recalibration; he humored me the way one does a whiny child. But then it started to click. I, and my cats, had smelled a gas leak far below what should be detectable by the human nose.
The punchline He said, "Oh yeah, I remember you, all right. No one back at the office believed me."
I pull over immediately and turn around. "Oh my god, was that you How cool!" I offer to come back to his dispatch office and prove his story to all and sundry, and he wants to take me up on it. Yes!
You know, usually I treasure this odd olfactory trait. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be a liability in this job....
—nightcabbie@wweek.com
Have you ever experienced the like? (Incidentally, I diagnosed my VW by smell occasionally too.)
I can wake up in the middle of the night and know which of the cats is currently sleeping on my head by smell. : )
And the same was true of my mother, and her mother, and her mother...
A keen sense of smell is a wonderful survival mechanism. I've met a few people whose noses were like bloodhounds', and my grandfather could tell when it was going to rain by smelling a handful of dirt. He was never wrong.
It reminds my of something my psychopharmacology professor said, along the lines of if our taste buds were as sensitive to sugar as our brains were to hormones, we'd be able to taste a single grain of sugar in a swimming pool...