I still don't know if I explained the phenomenon well in the comment threads I was in-- I hope (e:paul) didn't think I was implying he was crazy.
So here's an anecdotal case study from my job, about Multiple Chemical Sensitivities.


The other day I got a call from a customer who was very hard to talk to. I kind of get a lot of these. Since our product is widely held within the MCS community to be helpful to people, we get a lot of calls from people who have the condition. Most of them already know quite a lot about the product. (Others have very... interesting ideas about the product that I don't know where they got.)
Most of them also, as I have mentioned before, are crazy. It's gotten to the point that we can tell within the first moment of a call whether it's an MCS sufferer or not.
Their voices are usually high and breathy, whether they're male or female; their tone is quavering, unsteady, and demanding. Their sentences are often illogical. They usually start out the call with a tremulous demand to speak to someone technical. They make outrageous statements, often indicating that there has been some kind of victimization of them by either us or some other entity.
Usually, the call takes the form of a long, drawn-out story full of irrelevant details, in which they tell us the story of their chemical injury, something about their environment that eventually may reveal itself as a pertinent detail, something of how they have suffered, and then how our machine has let them down, one way or another.
Sometimes things take a turn, and instead of complaining how we've let them down, they praise us. That's always nice.
Often they must stop speaking to cough, sometimes for extended periods. They sometimes lose the thread of where they were going with this. Sometimes they weep.
Most of the time the long story is an obvious passive-aggressive ploy: they want us to say, "That's terrible! Have some free shit/ We'll give you all your money back despite our clearly-worded policy to the contrary that we know you know about." When we fail to respond in this expected manner, they repeat the story. It is often difficult to get them to come right out and say what they want from us. Alternatively, they will begin the story with their demand: "I want you to give me back all the money for the machine I bought three years ago not even directly from you," and then tell the story.
(They are not always women. I would say 9 out of 10 of them are women. The male MCS callers do not differ significantly in manner or content.)

So I got one of these calls on Tuesday. She was a real corker, totally incoherent, borderline delirious. She'd bought furniture, it had made her sick, so sick, it had taken her two days to figure out it was the chairs, these wing-back chairs, they were offgassing, it was in her den, oh my, oh my. So sick. Violently ill. Etc. Even after sending back the chairs, she still couldn't go into that room. It had been two weeks, she'd opened the window and put on a fan to ventilate the room, she'd put her air cleaner (one of ours) in there, but she still couldn't go in there.
It took me like half an hour to get enough sense out of her to realize she was asking whether it would be safe for her to use the machine of ours she'd put into that room in another room, or if she should replace the filter. The filter she was using was not our one that removes chemicals particularly, so I asked her, with a sinking feeling, whether she'd ever tried our chemical one.
She answered as I'd expected: "Yes, but it gave me a headache." Sometimes really really sensitive people can smell the carbon and "react" to it and get headaches etc. Which would be why she had the other filter, then.

I told her that she was reacting to such extremely low concentrations of the chemical that I really couldn't speak as to whether the machine would retain any-normally I'd say no, because it would be such a tiny amount nobody would notice it, but this lady... I told her she would probably be all right not to replace the filter, but that she shouldn't do any experiments or anything.

She called back three hours later. I didn't recognize her. She sounded calm, crisp, and professional. "When I called you before I was delirious," she said. "I don't remember precisely what we discussed. I had wanted to ask whether I should try that chemical-removing filter, because while I react badly to it, it's less bad than the formaldehyde from those chairs."
It was like a different person, but she had the same name and the facts of her case, once coherently presented, were roughly the same as the earlier whackjob. The voice was similar enough, I suppose, but no longer trembling or hesitant.
"My friends think I am crazy," she said grimly. "I know, and I cannot entirely blame them, but you can hear the difference. I know you don't know how I normally am, but this is me normal, and earlier, that was me after I opened the door to that room and let it air into the rest of the house. But I had had the window open and a fan going for three days, I thought there would be no possible way there could still be formaldehyde in that room. They were wing-back chairs with wooden legs-only the wooden legs touched the floor, which doesn't have a carpet. How could anything still be lingering in there? I couldn't smell anything." She laughed bitterly. "My friends ask when I'll get better. They ask what the doctor says. They ask if there's a pill I can take. They think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were going to make something up, it would be less stupid than this."

I finally found it! I found the article I was referring to earlier.
I wasn't saying that antique porn was more intellectual, I was saying that the current revival in antique pornographic art forms (i.e. burlesque) was spearheaded by intellectuals.

And this article explains it better than I ever could.



"Burlesque revival: more nerdy than sexy?" reads the headline.

""The base level of IQ is decently high," said James Habacker, 42, owner of "The Slipper Room," a burlesque-themed New York club that hosts Weldon's salon. "Even in the last year the supertalented old school have really stepped it up.""

This is a test of the upload ability.
Also it's an excuse to post the photo (e:zobar) just sent me.



He captioned it:
"self-explanatory and inexplicable all rolled into one"

It's a styrofoam coffee cup bandito and when I asked him what a styrofoam coffee cup bandito was, he sent me that photo.

I linked a coworker to a particularly nice photo of (e:matthew)'s on this site, and all of a sudden I'm like, Crap, what if he recognizes my username from my personal email address that I used to email him once?
Crap.
So hi, to my sort of boss, if you're reading this, and I swear, my older entries aren't interesting at all and do not contain possibly objectionable photos.

Actually I don't think I've blogged about my new job here at all. Now would be an absolutely genius time to start.

No, I'm not writing this at work!! I wrote this earlier and the server's timestamp is off!!

Oy. Oh well, I already sent him the link. We'll see how much of a detective my sales manager is. ;)

I had a lovely commute this morning. I know that's a weird thing to say. But I got in my car, which didn't have snow or frost on it, and drove down nice little back streets in North Buffalo, some with beautifully-tended gardens and some with rusty K-mart shopping carts poking out of the long grass, and got onto the 198 and drove past the park and the art gallery and the big beautiful church towers on Grant St., and went around the curve onto the 190 and there was the vista of the river on one side, the drawbridge and the Peace Bridge up behind it a black latticework of iron arches decorated here and there with idling trucks, and came around the bend to see downtown spread out to my left, skyscrapers with antique buildings nestled among the concrete, and then I was into the First Ward with the hulking old warehouses and brick factory buildings, until I reached my exit and drove over the railway overpass and a tangle of ductwork, a neatly-groomed lawn and pretty garden on one side and a chain-link fence with weeds growing through it on the other, and up to the huge brick behemoth of the factory where I work, sturdy and weatherbeaten.
I had good music on the iPod, and it just felt like it was the opening credits of a movie. The sky was dark and dramatic, light from the sunrise coming through banks of dark clouds in black and gray lined here and there with a strong pale silver light. I saw both a pickup truck with a plow on it and a bicyclist riding to work, at the same time; the leaves are changing but the grass is bright green and flowers are still blooming. It was a very Buffalo scene.