Craigslist rant: airfreshners
Feb. 20th, 2009 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
norsegirlI occasionally read "best of craigslist". It's better than most humour books written by comedians, and has the bonus advantage of being free. This post had me laughing so hard I was crying. Not the first few paragraphs, which were frankly full of purile young male humour, but this last bit where he finally gets down to the business of criticizing air freshners.
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I need something that smells good and these products are clearly marketed to not-me, so I simply choose the ones with the most innocuous sounding names. "Fresh Breeze" and one that had apples in the name are the ones I finally settle on. Their little plug in things so they are constantly working, which is good, because I don't want to spray myself in a cloud of what could be DDT, for all I know. I plug in Fresh Breeze and walk away. I Leave my basement suite for a couple hours and go do whatever the hell it is I do when I'm not at home.
When I walk back in my front door, old Mr. Airwick has a little surprise for me. While I was galivanting about the town, he was busy making my entire apartment smell like a 90 year old prostitute. The smell is so thick, it isn't even a smell - it's a taste. And let me tell you, air fresheners taste worse than they smell. In fact, a blind taste test is likely to reveal that the taste of your average air freshener is indistinguishable from Windex. Needless to say, every window in the house is opened and the door is propped open. 15 minutes later, all is okay. I look at the top of the little device and see that there is, in fact, a knob that adjusts the rate at which it heats the fluid that spreads the smell. It was on the second lowest setting. Needless to say, when the thing burns through liquid like that, said liquid is not going to last very long. On the lowest setting, it lasted 3 days. I wasn't sad to see it run out; The rancid over-the-hill hooker smell actually made me nostalgic for the smell of my own excrement.
Apple would have to be better. Afterall, who doesn't enjoy the smell of fresh fruit. I'm picturing maybe a nice waft of cinnamon apple pie greeting me at the door like a warm hug. What I got was far less pleasant. I open my door after the apple scent has had time to permeate every cubic inch of space (on the lowest setting, of course). I'm instantly bombarded by an olfactory assault, the likes of which I could barely fathom. This was not apple. This was was more like apple-juice thrice filtered through the failing kidneys of a starving third-world boy. It's rare that a fragrance makes me consider huffing bleach purely for the paralytic effect it is bound to have on my sense of smell. Needless to say, random-apple-flavour thing was even less successful than lady-of-the-night-circa-1920 thing. I've gone back to being awash in a sea of my own vaporous poo.
Two lessons to be drawn from this:
1) Hetero-friendly names would be a boon.
2) Smells that aren't liable to drive people to suicide would be a step in the right direction.
******************************
I need something that smells good and these products are clearly marketed to not-me, so I simply choose the ones with the most innocuous sounding names. "Fresh Breeze" and one that had apples in the name are the ones I finally settle on. Their little plug in things so they are constantly working, which is good, because I don't want to spray myself in a cloud of what could be DDT, for all I know. I plug in Fresh Breeze and walk away. I Leave my basement suite for a couple hours and go do whatever the hell it is I do when I'm not at home.
When I walk back in my front door, old Mr. Airwick has a little surprise for me. While I was galivanting about the town, he was busy making my entire apartment smell like a 90 year old prostitute. The smell is so thick, it isn't even a smell - it's a taste. And let me tell you, air fresheners taste worse than they smell. In fact, a blind taste test is likely to reveal that the taste of your average air freshener is indistinguishable from Windex. Needless to say, every window in the house is opened and the door is propped open. 15 minutes later, all is okay. I look at the top of the little device and see that there is, in fact, a knob that adjusts the rate at which it heats the fluid that spreads the smell. It was on the second lowest setting. Needless to say, when the thing burns through liquid like that, said liquid is not going to last very long. On the lowest setting, it lasted 3 days. I wasn't sad to see it run out; The rancid over-the-hill hooker smell actually made me nostalgic for the smell of my own excrement.
Apple would have to be better. Afterall, who doesn't enjoy the smell of fresh fruit. I'm picturing maybe a nice waft of cinnamon apple pie greeting me at the door like a warm hug. What I got was far less pleasant. I open my door after the apple scent has had time to permeate every cubic inch of space (on the lowest setting, of course). I'm instantly bombarded by an olfactory assault, the likes of which I could barely fathom. This was not apple. This was was more like apple-juice thrice filtered through the failing kidneys of a starving third-world boy. It's rare that a fragrance makes me consider huffing bleach purely for the paralytic effect it is bound to have on my sense of smell. Needless to say, random-apple-flavour thing was even less successful than lady-of-the-night-circa-1920 thing. I've gone back to being awash in a sea of my own vaporous poo.
Two lessons to be drawn from this:
1) Hetero-friendly names would be a boon.
2) Smells that aren't liable to drive people to suicide would be a step in the right direction.
