Sometimes people smell.

When it is a slight odor once in a while, or comes from a stranger in public, the polite thing to do is to just ignore it.

What happens when you have a coworker who has a horrible stench coming off of their body every single day?

That’s what happened to this woman, who finally decided to report it to the boss.

Check it out.

AITA for reporting my smelly coworker to our boss?

So here’s some backstory.

About a year ago my firm hired a young assistant (She’s 24 and we’ll call her Tammy).

The young lady works hard and is always polite.

Oh, that is the worst.

However, her hygiene is awful.

She smells funky on a good day, and extremely terrible on the bad ones.

It’s bad enough that we’ve received complaints from at least two clients.

Several of the coworkers have mentioned it, and one young lady actually purchased a goody basket of lotions, sprays, and dry shampoo and gave it to her.

That was weeks ago and all the bottles sit unopened on her desk and clearly unused.

How could you put up with that?

One gentleman said and I quote “It’s like something that crawled up out of a sewer, died, and then something else ate it, and they died too”.

She often has to enter my private office to bring me mail, and some days the stench that is left behind remains for hours.

Like a bad fog that I’m shocked we can’t all see like in a cartoon with flies.

It sometimes leaves me nauseated and I’m forced to continuously spray air freshener until it either fades or overpowers the stench.

It’s gotten so bad that no one wants her in their cars when we meet outside the office, because the funk will remain in your car for days if it’s hot.

I almost feel bad for her.

No one can really explain the cause, she’s not overly obese (though she’s a tad overweight) and she has access to a shower and washer and dryer (another coworker went to her apt).

I personally think she doesn’t bathe very often (her hair is very greasy and really thin for someone that young).

She also wears sleeveless shirts and has very thick underarm hair, and I think she doesn’t use deodorant and perhaps sweat is getting trapped there.

(I’m embarrassed to have noticed this, but if you smelled her you’d be questioning where it comes from too).

Now that’s an awkward conversation.

On Friday I finally had enough and mentioned it to our owner who is the only person with the authority to do anything.

He quickly went to her and very bluntly asked her to go home and shower and not to return until she did.

Now I feel like a complete jerk, since she was clearly humiliated.

Did i handle this wrong?

Should we ignore and accept people who smell terrible?

AITA?

That is a very difficult situation to be in, but I think she handled it the best way she could.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think.

Sometimes people need to be talked to bluntly.

The boss really should have addressed it privately.

Personal hygiene is important.

Hopefully this lady takes better care of herself in the future.

People tried to let her know.

Well this whole situation just stinks.

But at least it’s over. At least for now.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.