Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to put the air cleaner in the corner of the dining room. It’s quiet, most of the time, and unobtrusive. That’s not a problem. But it has a sensitive “nose,” and that can be a problem.
It works like this, you see: The unit sits and runs so quietly that you don’t even notice it’s there. Then, when it smells something suspicious, it wakes up and opens an orange eye as it ramps up the motor and starts pulling air more rapidly.
When it smells something it really doesn’t like, it becomes an activist. The eye turns red, and the motor goes into overdrive. It’s an angry sound — definitely noticeable. Distracting. It can be annoying.
Every morning when I make toast for my coffee to nest on, the air cleaner gets suspicious. If I burn the toast it becomes outraged – an odor activist performing with visual cues and sound effects. I can almost see it pointing its finger with its mouth wide open, like the offended people behaving badly for the lead art photos of click‑bait website articles. And just like those performers, the sound and fury of the angry machine doesn’t make the smell go away any faster.
Now imagine you’re sitting around the dinner table, air cleaner purring quietly in the corner, and the machine discovers that you have a flatulent dinner guest. The angry red eye of offense wakes up, and the roar of outrage interrupts the polite conversation. The guest is oblivious, but you bite into a dinner roll to mask your laughter. “Oh, it’s just the air cleaner. It doesn’t like the smell of broccoli.”
Without the outrage machine, polite society has no problem dealing with a gastro‑challenged dinner guest. Polite society ignores the faux pas, and the conversation continues uninterrupted.
But we don’t have a polite society today in the larger sense. There are too many air sniffers with a hair‑trigger red eye of offense, and they make no distinction between burnt toast and smells that really are offensive. What’s worse, when you’re filtering information, they make it difficult to decide what to pay attention to. They rage at far‑away smells that cannot possibly reach your nostrils, along with the accompanying roar of economic numbers, tales of collapse and political polls.
Many of these don’t pass the smell test, but all the noise prevents us from making good decisions about what requires attention, what is actionable (is the toast on fire? Maybe that really was the broccoli…), and what is just part of the general odor of humanity.
