Beardy Weirdy
I spent over a decade working in the games industry and rapidly learned that the single smelliest profession on the planet is "games programmer". By far.

But there was one individual who just took the piss on the "filthy, smelly bastard" front.

Many moons ago, I got a job working for a developer based in Oxfordshire. On the day I started, a coder also started. While we were sitting in reception, I tried engaging him in conversation, which fell down when it emerged he was unable to talk to actual people.

He ended up working one office along and clearly stopped bathing as soon as he started working there. Fairly rapidly, he started to smell bad, he never changed the clothes he wore and never shaved. Which is where the nickname of "Beardy Weirdy" came from. Pretty soon he smelled so bad that the other memebers of his team started complaining to management as it was making them feel physically sick. You could smell if he was in the building as soon as you walked through the door, even though he was behind a couple of closed fire doors.

Now, given that this particular dev was in a one-horse shithole of a town, accomodation was hard to come by. So when people were due to start working there, an email would go round to see if anyone had a spare room for people to live in while they found something permanent.

One poor artist ended up being offered Beardy Weirdy's spare room and took him up on it, not knowing what he was in for. When he moved into the flat, he discovered it was a total shit-tip. There were clothes all over the place, takeaway boxes adorned every surface and the sink was full of dishes that had been there so long that they had evolved their own ecosystems. Also, the light didn't work in the bathroom, which was in the middle of the building, so was pitch black. Once the artist managed to get Beardy Weirdy to talk, he was informed that it had never worked in the 6 months or so that he had lived there.

The artist did the logical thing and went the shop to buy a light-bulb. Upon putting said light bulb in the light fitting and turning it on, a scene of horror greeted him. The least awful thing about the bathroom was the complete lack of toileteries - no soap, no toothpaste, no shampoo, nothing. The next worst thing was the layer of dust in the bath and sink, which pointed neither of which having been ever used by the occupant.

The absolute worst thing about the bathroom was the corner where the bog sat. So much piss had been splashed around the place that it had actually eaten away at the carpet. The toilet itself was white in places, but the inside of the bowl was full covered in crusted shit. And it turned out the Beardy Weirdy wasn't too carefull when he wiped his arse, as there was used, shit-stained bog-roll scattered about the place.

Grim.

The artist in question slept on my couch while he found himslef somewhere else to live.
(ScousersPet, Fri 3 Feb 2012, 13:40, 1 reply)

Thank heaven for Rude Arty Northerners
I had a similar experience with one guy we worked with. When he left our employ, we removed a full binbag of paper and a further full binbag of empty sandwich wrappers and cans from his desk.

Luckily, we found a way to avoid his worst excesses - hire a Rude Arty Northerner as a designer. On his first day, Rude Arty Northerner, clad in a purple silk shirt and "Natural Born Killers" orange sunglasses, goes into our room, looks at Smelly Programmer and says "Jesus, you stink. When did you last take a shower?"

The next day, said Smelly Programmer turned up with clean hair and clothes, and occasional bouts of Northern Rudeness warned him if standards were slipping. This marked the start of a permanent and positive change in his demeanour, at least when at work.

Pity his code was more like his desk...
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 7 Feb 2012, 14:00, closed)