Odd job...

So in my previous post I wrote about being a test subject for new medications. That is one way I made some extra money in my younger days. I was also a participant in the University of Minnesota's odor lab. Yep, you read that right, I smelled stuff for some extra money. It sounds really strange and I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to even give it a shot, but I was attending the St. Paul campus and saw a flier for the odor lab promising a decent wage for four hours of my time. So I figured, what the heck I'll check it out. The first thing they had me do was go through a training. I had to smell different samples contained in petrie dishes and mark them on a scale of 1 to 10 as to how odorous they were. Then I moved onto the smelling machine or olfactometer. Basically a technician put an air sample bag onto a machine and I breathed in the air and rated how strong and how pleasing or displeasing this air sample was. I found out while doing this that I met the European Standard EN 13725 which means I can detect n-butanol in very small quantities (One EROM evaporated in 1 m3 of neutral air is the standard olfactory stimulus, equivalent to 1 European odour unit: 1 ouE/m3 for those science geeks out there). So what on Earth was I smelling? Well the unit I was working with was mostly interested in agricultural waste...yep you guessed it, I was smelling air samples taken at farms for pigs, cows, chickens, etc. Overall, it was quite a gig and really not such a bad deal. I also made a good friend out of the job, although so far I haven't added this position to my resume, nor have I found a good way to make use of my European standard smelling abilities beyond that job. I figure it's a good story for my grandchildren someday though.