Jobs that require a working nose

Kirk Ericson | Dec 15, 20220

Have you ever thought about which senses are necessary to do your job?

Sound?

Sight?

Smell?

Touch?

Taste?

Those are the Big Five, the big receptors. They are our connections to the material world.

Newspaper journalists rely on sight, mostly. We have to read what’s happening and we have to see what’s happening. If you can’t see, our jobs would be difficult, kind of like making bread without yeast. Our stories would turn out flat.

You’ll occasionally read a story in which a reporter shares the smell of an event, perhaps a pie contest at a county fair, but you’ll rarely read a story that has information about how something felt.

I bet you’ve never seen this in a newspaper reporter’s story: “The school board voted 3-2 Tuesday night to approve the new math curriculum, which was presented to board members in a three-ring binder that this reporter discovered had a cover that felt like newly plumped crushed velvet.”

A friend who worked as a bookseller regularly employed his sense of smell to do his job. I watched him go through a stack of used books he was assessing for value — he’d open a book toward the middle and then stick his nose in, right up to the binding. Then he’d inhale. Then he’d riffle the pages and inhale again.

He was smelling for mildew.

Maybe if you’d ask him whether a particular book was any good, one of the factors for him would be how it smelled.

“It’s a fantastic book. It smells like a Swiss alpine meadow bathed in sunlight right after a light springtime rain.”

“Good,” you might reply. “Because the last book you sold me smelled like crap.”

Speaking of which, I took a tour of a wastewater treatment plant with my son’s elementary school class. The fellow who led the tour was a longtime employee there, and he remarked that if he were blindfolded and placed in any location inside or just outside the plant, he could tell exactly where he was — just by the smell.

I hadn’t thought of that. Sewage in different states of deconstruction would present distinct odors, especially if you’ve been smelling them for 40 hours a week over several years. That guy had his stink down cold. It’s those kinds of skills that make for job security.

Another example of a nose job: I once returned a rented wetsuit to a dive shop. The fellow behind the counter picked up one of the booties and shoved his nose into the opening of the shoe. Then he took a big whiff.

What kind of freak sniffs other people’s shoes? Your own shoes, I get, but other people’s?

“Why’d you smell that shoe?” I asked.

“I’m smelling for salt,” he replied. “I can tell whether you took this into saltwater.”

Apparently, that was a no-no for the type of wetsuit I rented.

Here’s something to consider: What job requires the employment of all five senses? There aren’t many, but here are some:

Chef

Nurse and doctor

Farmer

Child care worker

Methamphetamine manufacturer

Some jobs require a sixth sense: fortune-telling, palm reading and talking with the dead.

Some jobs don’t require any of your senses: Being a test subject in a sensory deprivation tank experiment and having someone analyze your brain waves while sleeping.

I sense I’ve exhausted this topic.