The Battle of the Febreze Bags

Why do we make things harder than they need to be?

Last Sunday found me at The Home Depot to buy a piece of maple for the jaws of my new woodworking vise. I haven’t named the vise yet - possibly “Mr. Clampy”, “Clampy McClampyFace” per internet rules, or “Holdfast of the Bench”. I also needed tall kitchen trash bags and found myself in an aisle with different bag products that were all scented. I waded through several different boxes and purchased what I thought were unscented ones. Everything went downhill from there.

I was home and had the box of trash bags open before realizing they were treated with Febreze. Serves me right for being too lazy to put on my readers in the store. Age-related macular degeneration - 1: Brad - 0. Febreze is Proctor & Gamble’s olfactory ode to the nose-blind. It’s reminiscent of those stores at the mall filled with the overwhelming smell of potpourri and candles. Craft stores might as well be Pyongyang in terms of me ever setting foot in them: both are similarly oppressive. Now I was presented with a moral conundrum.

I grew up in a household of “waste not, want not” values handed down from working-class Britons that emigrated to Canada and America over the last few centuries. Therefore the new box of 50 perfectly functional kitchen trash bags had to be used. At the same time my body is a sensitive one, blessed with far-seeing eyes, great hearing, but also quick to react to strong odors, poor air quality, and harsh UV. Therefore, the new box of 50 horribly smelly trash bags had to be sealed in a biohazard container until the next trash day. My level of indecision - and the smell - escalated quickly.

The resulting battle was not pretty. Initially the “waste not, want not” side won out with me dutifully deploying one bag to the kitchen trash. I banished the box with the remaining bags to the garage. Unfortunately this meant Febreze had successfully established a beachhead on two different fronts. Open the kitchen trash to throw something away? Immediate assault. Walk out into my shop in the garage? Death by potpourri.

I lasted about half a day before the moral high ground crumbled and I began a counteroffensive. I wrapped the box of bags in a larger black garbage bag to seal them off from the rest of the garage. I started lobbying Minette about the smell in the kitchen. Her nose is not as sensitive but neither is she afflicted by the same waste not want not hang-ups. We ejected the bags from the kitchen thinking they were destined for kitty litter duty.

Like the Pyongyang leadership, the tyranny of the Febreze turned out to be hard to kill. A day later we had to wash the kitchen trashcan to try to get rid of the smell (partial success only). 3 days later and, weakened but not dead, the odor made it through the black garbage bag to once again infuse the garage. Trash day couldn’t get here fast enough. It’s now a week out and I’m still smelling hints of it.

A Knight Templar holding a garbage bag

In my forties I found “Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World”, a book that put words to many of my physical responses in life. It showed me that I was on a spectrum of people with sensory processing issues. I am generally a resilient guy, even aspiring to the ‘tough’ moniker at times. I’ve finished 3 Ironman races but you can stop me in my tracks with bad air or too much perfume. We buy unscented laundry detergent otherwise all I can smell is Tide when I walk around. As a sensory defensive The Battle of the Febreze Bags was just part of the wider War on Smells.

When I find myself stressing out about putting smelly garbage bags in the trash perhaps it’s time for some introspection. Why did this happen in the first place? What is “sunk cost fallacy”? What did I learn that I could apply in a wider context? How do the lessons apply to thriving longer in life? Could I actually perform a preemptive strike on the chemists at Proctor & Gamble?

I am a proponent of challenging myself and my body. Cold showers, hard hikes with a rucksack, or opening plastic packaging help remind me I’m able to do hard things. But life is too short to introduce random, meaningless stressors through inattention and not taking the time to get things right. I’m reminded of another one of those aphorisms I grew up with from the old country: “a stitch in time saves nine”.