Making a Stink - 225
Hal Wastes His Wages
April 10, 2007
 

Some of you may quickly accuse me of sinking to the lowest form wit with this column, but I assure you in this case it’s no laughing matter.

One year into New Jersey’s smoking ban, I find myself longing for those murky days of yore, when the public house was enveloped in a thick protective blanket of smog. As a bartender, the State’s intention was to protect me from the vile vapors of tobacco. But now who will protect me from something far more foul—the fetid fog of flatulence.

Go ahead and giggle if you like, but imagine being stuck in a room where people feel the apparent freedom to float their air biscuits at will. If I worked in a nursery with wee toddlers, perhaps that sort of behavior would be excusable, but in a room full of adults there is no room for the breaking of wind.

I’m sure this complete and utter absence of manners is nothing new. Hell, even I’ll admit to dropping the odd “daisy cutter” (a surgical strike in an attempt to clear space at an otherwise busy bar) or “strafing the enemy” (dropping one as you walk past someone you don’t like, in an attempt to make that person appear as the guilty party), but back then it was all harmless fun. With the absence of that protective layer of smoke, stakes have most certainly been raised. Nowadays a little trouser cough can infect the entire room.

Some nights are definitely worse then others. A night featuring draught specials you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a spike in methane levels. And I noticed there are certain seasonal factors, like Christmas, with its fruitcakes and eggnog, or St. Patrick’s Day, when most people aren’t used to processing Guinness through their systems yet they decide to drink it by the gallon on top of corned beef and cabbage. But one of the more disturbing trends in this epidemic of air pollution is that it’s always when the bar is crowded, thus indicating a conscious effort by individuals who think they can get away with tooting their own horn.

As bartenders we do our best to form a line of defense. We light the scented Yankee candles, we hit the air spray, we even throw lit matches in the direction of the offending party. But we can only do so much.

I look to the forward thinking legislators of the Garden State to continue their campaign for cleaner air. Make indoor public flatulence a finable offense, creating a work environment free of the evils of methane, which prolonged exposure to can result in headaches, fatigue, dizziness and vomiting.

In the meantime, let vigilante justice rule. If the guy next to you at the bar plays a one-man salute on the old colonic calliope, call him out. Whoever smelt it may not have dealt it, but I encourage them to deal with it.

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