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Maria Smells:
'This doesn't smell how I expected your workshop to smell ... '
said Maria, a musician friend of mine on visiting my workshop recently for the first time. She was pleased to see a shelf full of half made boxes, ready for my new gift range, interested in another shelf with a batch of instrument cases in progress [she is a recorder player] and agreed that the various tools, jigs and machines around the place were very nice.
But it just didn't smell right! Maria is very keen on smells and admitted that she has visited many workshops mainly for the SMELLS! She proclaimed herself disappointed at the lack of the sort of smells that she would have associated with the sort of work she knew I did. I did my best to explain to her that on that particular day I had not been converting aromatic timbers, french polishing, Danish oiling, or doing anything else to produce the pongs she craved. And it was long after we had all had our ritual morning coffee.
So, just for Maria, I put on a olfactory tour of the workshop. I band-sawed the ends off a few bits of wood, threw a few piles of selected sawdust around the place - gave her a few whiffs from some carefully selected [non-poisonous] bottles, waved a piece of fine pigsuede under her nose and she was in heaven.
The moral of the story? Well, there isn't one, really. Maria was not a potential customer, but it is important that the workshop smells right for those that might be. I do admit that a few of right aromas are hovering around at important times!