Parable of the Stinky Dude
Discover more from Dispatches From Dystopia
There once was a dude who stank.
He didn’t know that he stank, because he was used to the odor and couldn’t smell himself. Most of his friends and associates didn’t tell him because they didn’t want to hurt his feelings, or didn’t notice because they stank themselves and, therefore, couldn’t smell him.
But the dude’s co-workers noticed, and because there was no escaping the stink in their shared workplace, they were forced to tell him, even at the risk of offending him. One co-worker approached him and said, “Dude, you kind of stink.”
”I don’t stink!” said the stinky dude. “You stink!”
The criticism stung, but this co-worker went away and considered whether or not it was true that he, himself, was emanating a foul odor. After much self-search, the co-worker realized he did stink a little, and went out and found some very good soap, and started to use it regularly.
A second co-worker went to the stinky dude and said, “Listen, dude, you stink. You smell so bad that sometimes I can’t even be around you. I have to leave the office when you enter.”
“I don’t stink!” said the stinky dude. “None of my friends say that I stink, only the people who work with me.”
“Your friends don’t want to offend you,” said the second co-worker. “And anyway, a lot of them stink, too, each with their own unique foul odor, and some of them even walk around with their noses plugged up to avoid smelling their own stench.”
The stinky dude thought about his friends. It was true, some of them did have their noses plugged up most of the time. But it wasn’t because anyone stank, he decided, it was because that was the fashion. He turned to the second co-worker in anger. “Curses on you for saying that I stink!”
So the second co-worker went off and avoided the stinky dude, which made him feel sad. “Why is my co-worker avoiding me?” he thought to himself. “He must hate me.”
Around this time the first co-worker, smelling freshly of very good soap, came back to the stinky dude and said, “You still stink. Have you been showering?”
“Of course I shower!” But really, he didn’t shower very often, and when he showered, he did it halfheartedly.
“Do you use soap?”
“No, I don’t need to use soap. I don’t stink!”
“Okay, check it out. You told me I stink, and I trusted you because you share this small office space with me and would know better than anyone else. So I went out and found this great soap and started using it, and I stink a lot less now. I have an extra bar that you could have.”
The stinky dude had to admit that the first co-worker was smelling pretty good these days. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll try it. Just to get you off my back.”
He tried the soap once or twice, but didn’t fully commit. The first co-worker tried to encourage him, saying how much better he smelled when he used it, but the stinky dude was so offended at the idea that this encouragement might confirm that he really had stunk, that he rejected the encouragement and stopped using the soap.
The first co-worker suggested that there are a lot of other types of soap on the market, many of them very good. If the stinky dude didn’t like that particular soap, he could find another one that suited him better. But the stinky dude did not want to use any soap, so convinced was he of his not stinking.
Whenever the stinky dude went to the grocery store, he would go to the soap aisle and look at the soaps. He liked to look at soap and think about soap, sometimes. He fancied himself a man who knew pretty much all there was to know about soap; another reason why he didn’t think he needed to use it.
All the bars of soap in the soap aisle called out to him, silently, saying “Use us!” But the stinky dude couldn’t hear them.
The pure concept of Soap itself, floating in its eternal realm of being, reached its sudsy ethereal fingers out to brush the stinky dude’s armpit. But the dude didn’t feel it.
Eventually, the odor caused such a schism in the stinky dude’s workplace that the firm had to part ways with the stinky dude. In his next place of employment, the stinky dude was told by his new co-worker that he stank. “You’re just like my old co-workers,” the stinky dude complained. “Always making up smells that don’t exist. And anyway, you stink!”