TyJuray

A dream.

 My mother suffers from migraines that are often triggered by scent. This can range anywhere from cleaning products, scented garbage bags, cologne/perfume and so on. As such, she’s had to ask for accommodations in the facility she works. This has included wearing surgical masks, industrial respirators, and having a perfume/cologne free work environment.

Here’s the thing, since receiving the accommodations, my mother has gone to the hospital more than six times for perfume exposure. Why? Because her co-workers deliberately wear excess amounts of perfume or cologne to trigger her migraines because they believe their right to wear perfume outweighs her right to live. This is not an exaggeration, my mother’s doctors have repeatedly stated that any one of these incidents could actually kill her.

Oh, and let me be clear, these are deliberate incidents. These are documented grievances with witnesses. Witnesses who saw co-workers put on perfume before interacting with my mother or workers deliberately crossing in my mother’s work area despite not even working in the area. Workers who have admitted to exposing her on purpose.  Even worse, some of those who’ve exposed her are supervisors.

People don’t believe my mother when she says her migraines are triggered by scent. Because they can’t see it, they don’t think it can possibly be that bad. It has taken her literally being hauled off in ambulance for some people to understand the severity of her condition.

Until one day it was, and I had an asthma attack in the morning (thank the lord for people willing to share their inhaler with a broke kid with no scrip) and felt a second one coming in later and had to leave early despite some pretty strict attendance rules. (In fairness my trainer basically just didn’t report it so I didn’t get penalized for it for which I am eternally grateful.)

She was spoken to privately and the whole class was reminded about the rule and for 2 days she didn’t wear any. Day 3, she’s back at it again. So hey, I thought, maybe she just doesn’t get there are ACTUAL health issues happening. So on a break, after she’d started chatting with me and a couple other people, I asked: “hey, I’m not trying to be a pain but could you maybe not wear your body spray and scented lotion while we’re in the training room? It’s just a really enclosed space and I actually had an asthma attack the other day because the scents were triggering it.”

She rolled her eyes as if I’d asked for her to sit on the fucking moon or something. “Well I only put body spray on before I leave the house” not true “and my hands get dry so I have to use lotion.”

“Okay,” I said. “But like… maybe just not for the rest of the week? And then we’ll be out of training.”

“…but my hands will get dry.”

And then I might’ve given her a disgusted look and said “they make unscented lotion” and walked away.

But yeah. DONT BE THAT PERSON. I had a LITERAL GODDAMN ASTHMA ATTACK and her response was basically “who cares?”

At my old job as a telephone captionist, there were really strict rules in place regarding what you can and cannot have or do at your cubicle, because we’re dealing with people’s private conversations and any interference can be seen as a legal breech of callers’ basic rights under American law.

One of these restrictions is “no doing your makeup or attending to hygiene, not even while you’re not on a call.” Because it’s a distraction for the captionist, it’s a distraction for the people around the captionist, and just seriously who does that at their desk?! Anyway, this includes everything from using toothpicks to applying lipstick to nail clipping (yes people did it) to brushing your hair. Anything that makes noise, mess, or smell is a no.

Part of my job was to train people, and sometimes that involved supervising captionists who had failed a review recently to see if I could figure out what was going on. I was assigned to do this one night and we were having a perfectly normal session, captionist said they were getting headaches sometimes and thought maybe they were just getting tired because it’s third shift. Captionist wasn’t having any issues while I was with them… Until we were suddenly both becoming aware of an oncoming powerful headache. And I smelled something.

Sure enough, one aisle over, someone was painting their damn nails at their desk. I reported them, and found out that they had been warned about this more than once.