One time I worked in a doctor's office. We had this one nurse named Joanna who I guess maybe wasn't what you'd call a clean freak... though most of her failings were dog-related. I mean she had these dogs and she let them ride around in her car and get their fur all over it and mash their noses up against the windows and all, so we never went to lunch in Joanna's car.
Joanna also had some white nurse-pants that her dogs jumped on with muddy feet one day. At the time we figured that was the last we'd ever see of those pants, but no. The mud stains never came out but she continued to wear the pants at least once a week.
Still I can't say that her work habits were dirty, at least so far as I knew.
But one summer Monday I arrived at the office to find the waiting room doors propped open by electric fans, the patients gagging, and an aggressive smell in the air--a downright shocking odor suggesting that perhaps a corpse had been stuffed with expired tuna and left to decompose behind the magazine rack.
Joanna had forgotten to clean the speculums.
Apparently once speculums were used, the nurses dropped them into a container of cleaning solution temporarily and then sterilized them all at once when the day was over. Joanna had neglected this little duty, and the result, after a weekend of marination, was a smell so thick it made you embarrassed to be a girl.
I don't know if she got into trouble for it or if the doctors figured she was suffering enough already. I just remember thinking that I hoped it wasn't a first visit for any of the patients that morning. No excuse in the world could have convinced me to be examined in that office after one whiff.
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