The Vine: July 26, 2005
Hi, Sarah:
The odor is caused when the bacteria on your skin gets onto your watch. The best way to solve the problem is to kill the little buggers. Do this by putting your watch in a ziplock and storing it in the freezer overnight.
This practice worked wonders for my husband’s arm-band radio (which he always had on during his workouts and smelled truly rank).
Good luck,
B
Dear B,
That sounded like a great idea…alas, I don’t have a detached freezer, so my freezer is quite frosty, and I just didn’t feel safe about doing it. But you weren’t the only one to suggest it.
A number of readers suggested not wearing the same watch every day, which I don’t; I have a good dozen watches total and I try to rotate them. The issue, really, was that I’d had the two primary troublemakers for several years and I just needed to suck it up and replace the bands…which I was reluctant to do, because they’re both Paul Frank and I didn’t think the replacement straps would look right. But my watch guru on 5th hooked me up: one rubbery synthetic strap and one Velcro sport strap, $16 total, and they look great.
Other suggestions below (multiples starred as usual).
get a metal band (a no-go in my case; during the summer, non-precious metals give me nasty contact dermatitis)*
don’t wear a watch at all (this is like asking me to go naked, but okay)
leather cleaner/leather protector
saddle soap*
apply a thin film of deodorant to the inside of the watch band
clean with rubbing alcohol
apply a layer of packing tape to the wrist side of the watch face
Croakies
change the band*
wipe off at night with a baby wipe or a paper towel spritzed with Febreze
dip a cotton ball in Listerine and wipe down
dust your wrist with Gold Bond powder or daub it with perfume where the strap would go (tried that second one; no dice)
Dear Sars,
My problem is of the feline variety. My cat Gatsby is, to put it politely, a bit on the portly side. The vet recommended switching him to a “less active” formula of kibble. He doesn’t seem to mind this, has lost weight and things are going swimmingly.
The problem is that since switching his food, his breath is now absolutely revolting. It smells like a combination of rotten fish, garbage, and stale milk. To make matters worse he is a “kisser” who likes to put his face close to yours. I used to find this cute, now it makes me gag. Then, he bathes himself in this disgusting saliva and he is just stinky. I’ve read “So Your Cat Has Ass Breath” and realized that Little Joe suffers from a similar problem, and I wondered if you might have any advice on the matter. Thanks so much for your help!
Sincerely,
Do They Make Altoids for Kitties?
Dear Alt,
A big part of Little Joe’s problem, as it turned out, was rotten teeth…which I’d asked about repeatedly at the vet, and they’d told me every time, “Oh, no, the teeth look fine,” and then on one visit it was like, “Well, umpteen teeth have to be pulled — didn’t you notice a change in his breath?” Um…a “change” like…what, from “dead body” to “two dead bodies”? We’ve been over this, his breath reeks.
Anyway, they yanked a bunch of teeth and his breath improved, but it’s still kind of stank, so first, take him to the vet and have them look carefully in his mouth. If teeth need pulling, do it; it’s expensive, and sort of scary-sounding, but cats actually do not need all that many teeth to eat kibble (or anything else), and it’s better for them in the long run.
The second thing is to brush Gatsby several times a week so the breath build-up on his fur doesn’t linger, sink into your furniture where he sleeps, et cetera. It’s a vicious cycle: the cat’s breath stinks; he washes with it; he stinks; he licks himself, so his breath stinks even more. Brush him regularly and switch his brand of treats to the crunchy tartar-busting kind.
Hey Sars,
I’m not a confrontational person, and my fiancé is so non-confrontational he would rather hide under a table than admit he got served the wrong meal or something like that, so an urge I’ve been getting lately is fairly new to me. Might as well say that we live in L.A. for the time being (I think it makes a difference, people here are crazier than in other places), and when we go out in public, we daily witness people being so unbearably rude that it makes me insane with rage (fingernail marks in palms, the whole deal).
If a stranger is rude to me, sometimes I’ll say something, most of the time I’ll let it go; I am most of the time pretty easygoing and things tend to roll off of me. But when I see people verbally abusing the person who’s dishing out their ice cream or making their mocha latte, it drives me crazy.
So here’s the question: is it ever appropriate to confront a stranger about how they’re treating someone who is another stranger to you? I feel like L.A. is making me a much angrier person than I used to be, and I don’t know what the appropriate public response is when someone walks into a Dairy Queen or a Starbucks and immediately starts screaming at the employees about how he or she is being treated before the door has even shut.
I’m not sure that I would feel better if I said anything to these people, right now I’m just trying to figure out how to lower my stress levels in general. Just saying something to my fiancé and letting it go isn’t even an option, he would prefer me not to talk about it and pretend like these people don’t exist. That’s his way of dealing with it, but it doesn’t work for me, so do you have another option? Thanks and keep up the good work, you’re my daily dose of East Coast reason —
Screaming on the inside
Dear Scream,
That kind of server/waitstaff abuse in New York City is relatively rare. You see dippy behavior constantly, of course — holding up the whole line at Key Food digging through their giant purses to find a dime, like, just take the freakin’ ninety cents change before the rest of us die of old age back here — but customer pitching a fit? You don’t get that very often. I’ve seen it happen in L.A., I’ve seen it happen in my hometown…people just getting pissed that the whipped cream got left off their mochas or the register jock biffed a nickel. Pissed. Stroppy tone, demanding to see a manager, the whole bit. And my theory is that, in areas/cultures where people are more spread out, and where they spend a lot more time in their cars, isolated from other people — places like L.A. or suburban New Jersey — you’ll see this happen more often than you will in New York, because getting along with people in close quarters is not as critical a skill as it is here. We’re not nicer people or anything, but you have to pick your battles, and…we would never pick that one, I think because we have more to choose from.
All this by way of saying that it’s not something I see often enough for it to bother me overly, or to have a formal strategy in place for dealing with it, but if a person can’t resist abusing a Starbucks barista, it’s not a bad bet that they can’t resist getting into it with you, and at best, it’s just going to make you angrier. So, I would leave it alone as far as having a word with the fit-pitcher him- or herself, because it just never goes well. What I usually do in those situations is to get up to the register, quietly snark to the barista that I hope she gave that guy the decaf, and be all pleasant smiles and please-and-thank-yous myself — just kind of bringing it down a notch. I mean, I hate entitled douchebags like that too, but calling them on it almost never has the desired effect, so stop the cycle by treating the victim nicely yourself, and move on with your day.
[7/26/05]
Tags: Ask The Readers cats etiquette NYC rando
