Speaking of smelling a mile away.....

Although I am out of radio I do announcing for high school sports teams and recently a small local station has started broadcasting a few of the games. Don't want to say what sport, I'm trying to keep from identifying the guy. Anyways he rumbled into the press box and the smell from him was indescribable. Flies were beating on the door.....trying to get OUT of where he was at! Bad enough that it made me gag. Luckily the press box had sections and I was able to close the door to my section but after the game when we opened the door....WHOA! Spoke to the producer who was running the mobile unit for him and asked him how he could stand it. He went on a tirade for about 1/2 an hour just saying how horrible it was in the studio when they do the morning show and as soon as he leaves they light matches and wave them all over and spray Febreeze to try and eliminate the smell. Apparently he has been fired from every station he has worked at for his B.O. and when it's been brought up with him he flies off the handle and gets really irate and starts screaming that they're persecuting him. From what I've been told he's been left boxes of soap, cases of deodorant, industrial strength odor eliminators that fire departments use for smoke removal on his desks at every station he worked at and he just threw them in the trash. Anybody else work with someone like that and how did you handle it? I'd probably come in to work with a gas mask on if I had to work with him.

I had a friend who was a major market DJ with a 3 to 4 person morning team about 25 years ago. The news guy had gas so bad that they ended up building him a separate studio down at the end of the hall and stuffed him in there to do the news and interact with the rest of the show. Before they had built the news guy his own little studio they had came back from a break and my friend didn't know the mic was on and you could hear him just raving at the news guy for farting and how bad it smelled. After the next break he came back and apologized for the rant and I believe the producer who left the mic open was soon Gone With The Wind so to speak. When I saw him later that week, told him I laughed so hard I almost wet myself. Told me he was embarrassed by his "unprofessional-ism" and should have remembered the old teaching of "ALWAYS assume the mic is live when you're in the studio".

Seems kind of mean spirited. Have ever considered the person may have a medical reason for his malodorous condition? Perhaps a situation that he has little or no,control over.

TeaPartyDude said:

Seems kind of mean spirited. Have ever considered the person may have a medical reason for his malodorous condition? Perhaps a situation that he has little or no,control over.

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Actually, I have thought it might be a medical problem. I've known of him for years but I never worked at a station with him [usually he worked there after I was there], I have now talked to people that have known him for years back to his college days and they say that it's basically lousy hygiene. If he had to go to a function [awards dinner, press conference, etc.] they say he shows up smelling fresh as a daisy. It's just that when it comes to his co-workers, he doesn't care. [I've worked in a non-radio job one year where I had to deal with the public and one of my co-workers reeked to high heaven. He said he never bathed when he came in to work so customers would stay the hell away from him and we worked in a place that had no A/C so by the end of the shift no one wanted to be near him. So that might be his issue also.]

DavidEduardo said:

Were that the case. the person has a responsibly when working with others to take steps to advise co-workers of the condition and to do what he is able in order to not invade the space of the coworkers with the stench.

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And by the way, I wasn't the only one in the press box. I have 3 other people I work with. The smell was bad enough to make one worker physically ill to the point she ended up having to open windows and stick her head out to gulp some fresh air to try and keep from barfing. Soon as the game was over everybody evacuated the press box ASAP.

DavidEduardo said:

Were that the case. the person has a responsibly when working with others to take steps to advise co-workers of the condition and to do what he is able in order to not invade the space of the coworkers with the stench.

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Many people in Radio are not that clean, Hygiene wise. Since we usually operate in smaller confined work spaces than most jobs do this is something that is known in the Industry. Why I ran into one guy in Miami you knew (Rosa) and he was still resting his feet on studio furniture except now he had a foot disease. My coworkers would blow their nose on the walls (the one nostril thing) and spit on the Carpets. Bathing was not a regular activity for many. Reminded me of the person who trained me at KSURF, we'll call her "Hands". Another announcer had to turn to me and make a comment when "Hands" left the Studio

Hot Hits said:

Reminded me of the person who trained me at KSURF, we'll call her "Hands". Another announcer had to turn to me and make a comment when "Hands" left the Studio

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Hot Hits - tell us more about KSURF (the predecessor to the great MARS-FM on 103.1 in Santa Monica). As we have regular posters here on RD with LARadio experience, like you, it would be nice to read some color/background about your experiences.

I was working radio in a small city and had a national 'diet' company as a client. I was overweight so they said to keep advertising I had to agree to use their program. Literally I became their poster boy success story. They offered me a job 4 hours a week to teach the behavioral modification class (just pose the questions to the folks that are in the book). It was easy money. A guy in one class, a really nice guy, was easily double sized and working on triple. He'd come straight from the shower to the class. By the end of the hour class the room had such a bad stink all you wanted to do was go home and change clothes and take a shower. He had some medical problem, I guess...a smell somewhere between BO and rotting flesh. It made my eyes tear up! He used to joke he really needed to lose weight because he was the only guy banned from the lunch buffet at a local pizza place, not for the smell but the quantity of food he could put away. Then again, it might have been the smell and the manager was trying to be nice.

david said:

Hot Hits - tell us more about KSURF (the predecessor to the great MARS-FM on 103.1 in Santa Monica). As we have regular posters here on RD with LARadio experience, like you, it would be nice to read some color/background about your experiences.

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it was a very small place located right next to the Santa Monica Greyhound station. Kind of dirty with terrible old equipment, great audio processing though! In the mid/late 80s we were A/C Oldies based, the great Steve Day was the PD and did mornings with Rachael Donahue. During a portion of most of my stay KOCM was "Shadowcasting" KSRF and the two combined sometime around 1989. It was funny living in North Hollywood as most times I heard 103.1 out of Santa Monica although sometimes the Newport Beach 103.1 would come in!

The last station I worked at, I worked with a guy who had no sense of smell. He also wore the same pair of jeans all week and bathed sporadically. Spending time in the studio with him was excruciating. It became a running gag on the show, and a literal gag behind the scenes.

frankberry said:

Why in the world didn't someone tell the guy to go take a shower? Afraid of offending him? He didn't mind offending you, did he?

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I am not the boss, I am a freelancer hired to announce high school sports. Not my position to tell him. And if you have dealt with any of the higher ups in a school system, they are so afraid of offending anybody of anything because they might have to try and pass a school levy and don't want to piss off anyone that might cost them a vote. A sports team I DON'T announce for played some rap songs over the PA for warm up music and a parent went absolutely bezerk. You would have thought that someone had shot a basket full of puppies on live TV. So the edict came down, no music that has any curse words in it, even hell or damn or any music that was suggestive of sex [i.e: No more songs like "Angel Is A Centerfold" even though it's played on the radio and I played it for years before that. I decided fine, nothing but pop hit instrumentals from here on out. They even complained about that. Since I like my job, I'm not saying anything because what will happen is he'll complain and I'll be unemployed. [From what I've heard, he was told several times at various stations he worked at to clean himself up otherwise action would be taken. He refused so he was fired.]

i once worked with a guy who continually munch on cloves garlic at his work station. The pungent odor of garlic filled the workplace. I confronted him one day and I learned he was investing the garlic because of a medical condition. All I am saying is don't be too quick to judge.

TeaPartyDude said:

i once worked with a guy who continually munch on cloves garlic at his work station. The pungent odor of garlic filled the workplace. I confronted him one day and I learned he was investing the garlic because of a medical condition. All I am saying is don't be too quick to judge.

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Not being quick to judge. After the guy showed up for a third broadcast smelling like a garbage truck just leaving a diaper recycling facility is when I [and everyone else] got exasperated. I've actually been on medicine where one of the side effects was excessive sweating and caused some odor problems. I dealt with it by taking extra showers and wearing more deodorant/antiperspirant. Usually, if it's a medical condition, they can give you medicine to combat the illness/disease/whatever to combat the problem and the stink. This is plan, old unwashed, weeks or months at a time, B.O. stench OR he has no idea how to operate a washing machine and is wearing the same old unwashed clothes for months at a time. And like David said, if it's a medical condition, he needs to let people/employers know. Maybe he doesn't care to let them know and doesn't care if he gets fired. If he lets them know AND if he gets fired [again] he may be able to come back and sue them for violating the disabilities act. Either that or start working for a station where all of the workers have no sense of smell. Or maybe he just hates people, wants no one around him and this is his way of accomplishing that.....which makes it strange why he chose radio as a career.


Myself.....I have a crap-load of allergies. One of the ones that I am super allergic to is cigarette smoke. I'm old enough to have worked at stations where everyone smoked like demons in the on air-studios to the point you could see nicotine stains and tar streaking the walls. Maybe they all wanted to sound like Marge Simpson's cigarette smoking sisters. I didn't really bitch about it because that's just the way things worked. I'm sure if I complained I would have been out the door. Easier to get rid of one non-smoker than a station full of them. I worked overnights [most of the time] so as soon as my shift started I broke out the air fresheners I brought in, the ashtrays went way down in the hallway and I left the studio door open and sometimes an outside door open with a fan stuck in it to get some fresh air coming in [can't do THAT anymore]. As time went on, was glad to see the smoking went away, usually due to the engineers bitching that it was causing equipment problems or management being hired that didn't like the smell of smoke or smoking and banned it and in a rare couple of cases because a sales client came in to the station and turned around and walked out because they were also allergic to smoke [to the point when one client walked in and said "Boy, it really stinks in here".] They decided not to advertise on the station just because of that.

So, in conclusion, I'm all for doing your own thing but if it affects other people......STOP IT or correct YOUR issue. I was just interested if other people had this problem with co-workers and how they handled it. I am done working with him in my vicinity cause my sport's season has concluded....so we'll see if he's still employed with this station by the time the season starts next summer/fall. I just feel sorry for people that have to deal with him for the 30+ hours a week he is at the radio station. {And full disclosure...I was going to work for the station until they said I could "volunteer" my time. My answer was, "If you can pay your morning AM drive time crew, then you can pay me. I'm am [or was] a professional; I don't work for free." Now that I know they have "Ol' Stinky" there, glad they didn't hire me.}

In the early 90s, I managed a retail store, and ran into this situation twice, with employees. First guy just had bad hygiene - didn't wash often. He wasn't that way when I hired him, but from what I could gather, had become very depressed and stopped bathing. For some reason, it's much easier to confront an employee about performance problems, than to tell him he stinks, and has to do something about it. He wasn't aware that he smelled bad - I guess you get acclimated to your own odor. So by telling him, I was doing him a favor, and he started bathing more. The second guy was in the final stages of AIDS, and had been in total denial. How the guy functioned even marginally in the workplace, I can't explain. He didn't have any outward signs like lesions, though he was getting emaciated. When I confronted him, he quit, and went on disability. He later came back for a visit, and admitted that everybody else knew he had AIDS, but him.

So yeah, I try not to judge.

Years ago I had amedical condition, and the medicine I had to take caused me to suffer from severe flatulence. My coworkers were more understanding than some of the people here and reasonably accommodated me.

TeaPartyDude said:

Years ago I had a medical condition, and the medicine I had to take caused me to suffer from severe flatulence. My coworkers were more understanding than some of the people here and reasonably accommodated me.

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Hey, I also suffer from severe farting usually when I get very nervous. Genetic condition, very screwed up digestive system, no matter what I ate caused me gas. But I was able to control it and if I couldn't I got up and went outside or to the bathroom. As I said, this guy had plan old unwashed body odor and has been doing this for decades. Talked with people that have known him for years and others that had worked with him at past stations and they have said it's not medical because if he had to cover some important press conference or deal with a high up muckity-muck he came in smelling fresh as a daisy. It's just that he apparently doesn't care if he stinks to high heavens. I don't know,maybe he saw "Psycho" when he was a kid and the shower scene scarred him for life and he's terrified of tubs and showers. Whatever, I don't have to deal with him again till next August or September.....if he hasn't been fired from this current station by then.