We Figured Out What the Smell in Our Office Is and Are No Longer Taking Internship Applications

So for a while now there has been this looming smell in the VICE UK office, over the editorial desk. Office smells, especially in summer and early summer climates, are a hard subject to broach with your colleagues, because initially when you notice the smell a small part of you suspects it might be you, or related to something you did.

So maybe your breath is now just so bad doctors need to rebuild your mouth and throat from the inside out. Maybe you stepped in a whole mess of dog shit on the way in today and did not notice it until the smell started wafting up. Maybe your personal hygiene has just decayed to such an extent that you smell like a dog died a long time ago in a cold bath, that sort of thing. I don't know! But it's a very human reaction, I think, to take one go on a smell and slightly suspect it might be emanating from you.

We figured after it had been running for a few days that it wasn't any of us.

So anyway, this smell. I am going to try and describe to you the smell: have you ever smelled a dead rat that has bloated and decayed behind a radiator? Cat owners are normally quite familiar with this smell: cats, bless them, are very good at catching rats and bringing them to the house but not actually killing them, just mortally wounding them, and the rat manages to sprint away from the cat – cats, bless them, are very, very dumb, and easily tricked by rats – and then goes and dies and bloats behind a radiator, and that death/bloating combination smells really, really bad. Okay? So the smell was worse than that.

Or: have you ever just smelled sort of stale water? I once worked in an office with another smell – not as bad as this smell, nowhere near as bad as this smell – and when we finally identified what it was we traced it back to a water-based air conditioning unit, where the unit had to be refilled with a tray of water each day, then a slowly roving sponge wheel would pick the water up and, while rotating, cool it by blowing air thru it, which would humidify the room; only, the sponge wheel was now ancient, and so while it did function to humidify the room it also worked as a sort of enormous machine created only to produce the smell of vomit – like someone vomited in a tray of water and left that to just sort of settle in a room, and that smell just spread and then settled. Someone in the office once described the smell as being very "raw", and that has stuck with me ever since: like a plughole, full of old wet pieces of sliced carrots and other vegetable debris, little globs of bread, peas, detritus. Raw. Okay? So the smell was worse than that.

If I were to say "the smell smelled like shit", I would be correct. But if I were to say "the smell smelled like dead bodies or a carcass", I would also be correct. It was a very odd, particular smell. A very odd bad smell.

Here are some assorted Slack™ messages sent about the smell in the last month or so of smell, just to give you an idea of the smell, and the disruption to our lives wrought by the smell:

We have wasted a lot of our Office Manager's time with the smell, because for a long while we thought the smell was coming from the air con unit above our desk, and sent lots of complaining emails pertaining to that fact, which she duly investigated. I mean, at one point this involved tracing the whole air-con system out back to where it exits through a vent in the building, and talking to the builders on a nearby building site that happen to be working there, asking them sincerely if their work could possibly be causing a sort of shit-cum-corpse smell to waft up through the system onto our desk, where we could smell it. They said no. A lot of time has been spent on this smell. A lot of resources have gone into this smell.

Reader: today we identified the source of the smell.

It was a three-month-old bag of chicken slices left to rot under an intern's desk.

Annie was our intern for a three-month period from March until the start of June – a truly fantastic intern who did A+ transcription, was a delightfully cheery presence in an office full of long-soured media types and had a real eye for a metaphor. She's currently looking for work and you would do well to hire her.

No, because Annie's not like that.

In April a new Veggie Pret opened around the corner from our office and Annie went down to offer chicken slices to the people queuing up outside there as they stood and hankered for vegetables. It was a fun and lighthearted photo-led piece that many online vegetarians and vegans took an enormous amount of offence to. To those vegans and vegetarians, I say: karma, through the medium of smell, has well and truly served us back for this one. Annie interviewed various members of the queue about vegetables. You can read the piece here.

VICE: Hi, is this David Gray?
David Gray: Speaking, yes.

I was wondering how dangerous it is to have three-month-old chicken under a desk.
In what sense?

Well, it's that sliced, pre-cooked chicken from supermarkets, and it's been in a tote bag under our desk for three months. What would happen if someone ate it?
Well, I couldn't say for sure what would happen as I'd have to test it for bacteria and what was actually in it first. But I certainly wouldn't advise eating it.

Would it make someone violently ill?
Well, these types of products have a sell-by date, and if they're kept out of a controlled temperature for that long then it would be dangerous – but again, I can't say exactly what would happen if someone ate it without testing it first.

Okay. What about inhaling the meat fumes every day for three months?
Well, if anybody is feeling ill or has been feeling ill it wouldn't hurt to go and seek some medical advice, but I think on the whole if you're all feeling OK I wouldn't worry too much.

Do you deal with cases of meat inhalation a lot?
No, not really. I think mostly just questions about sell-by dates and so on. But you should be fine; I wouldn't worry too much.

Okay. Thank you, David.

"I can't believe the chicken smell was me the whole time. I apologise to everyone at the desk that had to continually breathe in that wafting fart/bin smell and to the people who put great efforts into trying to diagnose it when it was literally under my feet. I wish I could take back what I did, coming into the office and dumping my shit everywhere without checking if there was processed chicken slices that would disintegrate if not disposed of."

@joelgolby