The grossest thing that ever happened to me at work…

Recently, a friend who admires the down-to-earthiness of cheese asked, “what is the grossest thing that ever happened to you at work?” I had two words for her: “ponytail” and “Raclette.”

When we first opened and I was the only cheesemonger, we almost always had a line and I was almost always in a super-hurry. On one of those days, we had just received a beautiful, ripe wheel of Raclette. When a customer asked for a big hunk, I unveiled the moist, sticky, stinky wheel and realized I needed some wax paper with which to handle it (you know, so my hands wouldn’t stink all day). Quickly reaching underneath my work table, I suddenly heard the telltale “fwap!” of my ponytail whipping over and completely gluing itself to the top of the cheese. Of course, I had to brush it off, like “I meant to do that,” so slowly, but with much resistance, I pulled my hair off of the cheese, at which point the super-smelly tail actually flopped the other way and stuck to the side of my face. The line was so long that I couldn’t take a break to clean myself, so I simply stripped the hair off of my cheek, smoothed it, and carried on with work. After a few minutes, it had hardened into a nasty mane of reekiness and for the rest of the day, all I could do was smell like something had died on my head. Honestly, I still stink nine years later.

Pretty gross, to answer the question.