Our offices are close to a couple of Life Science departments on campus. Specifically, Watershed Sciences and Wildlife, Fish & Conservation Biology. It’s kind of cool because the former has big windows on their ground-floor labs, and you can walk right by them and see people inside wearing white lab coats, peering into enormous microscopes and swirling test tubes around. You know, SCIENCE. Neat.

The latter is cool because there are labs with big vat-like tanks holding fish spawning experiments and photoreactivity whatsits and who only knows what else, and it seems like every other office has an awesome tropical fishtank inside it. Yay, more science! You can hear the pumps at all hours of the day, and the hallway smells—ever so faintly—of running water, with the slightest tinge of algae. Except for when one day I swear to God it smelled like fish and chips. Oh well, I guess even the failed experiments have their silver lining.

Today, though, the hallway had a really weird odor to it. At first blush it was mildly repellent, a malodorous funk, but as I made my way down the corridor, I detected clean, bright, and appetizing notes. I halted my perambulation momentarily to fill my puzzled nostrils with the scent, so that I might have more of it to judge it by. I can honestly say I’ve never smelled anything like it. If I had to describe it as quickly as I possibly could, I would say it was a… well, a sort of Lemon Musk.

I wonder what they’re doing in those labs now.