Huffman Coding

Two days ago a co-worker noticed a pleasant smell in my office. Oddly enough he was the second person to make such a comment within a span of a couple of hours. A nice sweet smell.

I had to take him at his word because I have a very degraded sense of smell. An odor has to be very strong and foul before it will register with my olifactory sensors. Flowers don’t register, nor does perfume. Spoiled milk in a sippy cup that has rolled under the passenger seat of my car and baked in the hot sun in an airport parking lot for a week doesn’t either. Nope, not until I remove the lid and stick my face in it. (But I digress.)

So yesterday when another co-worker remarked that they sweet smell had become a much less desirable sweet-vinegary smell I took notice. I enlisted about a half dozen co-workers to help me deduce the cause. We, um.. THEY couldn’t quite locate the exact source. It was important that we do so because I was going to gone for the holidays and I didn’t want the smell to foment in my office for a couple weeks. I would become a pariah when I returned. Perhaps even more than I already am among my fellow employees.

I had apples in my office for lunch and they were banished from the room to see if they were the cause. They weren’t. I also have a tabletop full of soda cans that were destined for home and recycling. They were empty and didn’t seem to be the problem. Since the company provides soda for free, my co-workers drink more than they normally would at home and few dozen are dropped off on the table each day. I remove the tabs off each one for Ronald McDonald House, then crush and bag them.

Occasionally the cans deposited will still have residual liquid in them and I will have to dispose of the can’s contents before crushing. Why bother finishing a warm can if another cold one is available for free? There is one particular friend who usually cannot commit to an entire twelve ounces at a time. I keep a milk jug for that purpose. I dump the unconsumed sodas in the jug and then take it to the bathroom for disposal. I purposely chose an opaque jug.

To eliminate another possible odoriferous culprit, I decided to crush and bag the cans. But they weren’t the source of the smell either. It remained after the cans were in the bag. Unlike usual, I hadn’t emptied the jug the last time since I used it, so I just added to it. On the way to the bathroom with the capped milk jug, I stopped by a friend’s office to lament the fruitless search for the smell’s origination. During the conversation, I patted the side of jug and, apparently under pressure, it burst a hole at a seam. The source of the stench was thus discovered. I was lightly spritzed with brown soda. Even I could smell the effect of the leftover soda that had been fermenting in the jug.

I took the jug, which had thankfully not lost much of its contents, immediately to the washroom commode. In my haste to dispose of the aromatic fluid, I had forgotten that the milk jug now had a hole in the side of it and the soda mostly ended up on the stall floor.

I then grabbed a large handful of paper towels from the dispenser to wipe up the mess. In case you are ever in this situation, be advised that a dozen or so paper towels do not flush as easily toilet paper. And whatever you do, do not attempt to resolve the situation by flushing a second time when it backs up.

It seemed important right at that moment to think fast. The adjoining stall, thankfully empty, had a deformed plunger. After re-forming the plunger into a cup, it proved capable of saving the day and preventing this blog entry from getting any longer this current is. Whew.