Read on Twitter
1) Epic thread time. The weirdest job I ever had in LA was working for a company that sold products with human pheromones mixed inside that men (mostly men) and sometimes women would buy for the purposes of attracting people, or getting them to respect you, etc.
2) The products had names I won't use here but things like "Sexy Sexy" or "Let's Chat" and also a foul smelling product that had animal musk in it people would buy for job interviews that was supposed to give off alpha male vibes to gain respect. It cost $100. People bought it.
3) The office was in WeHo in this ugly ancient building we were told couldn't get approved to be torn down, so there it stood. It had no parking spots so we were required to feed our meters every 2 hours and negate our income for the day if we got a parking ticket. It sucked.
4) It was owned, we were told, by a hippy dippy woman who lived in another state. Let's call her "Harmony." We would never *talk* to Harmony. Only via e-mail. My job was to label bottles and ship packages, and later even mix/make these products from strange bottles of pheromones.
5) We would also interact with 2 salespeople working for the company. 1 lived in America somewhere and 1 on a foreign island. We'd speak via Skype and sometimes the woman on the island would say things like "It's hard to work today because my house was swept away by a hurricane."
6) For a long time I never spoke to "Harmony." It was just random friends (how I got the job) working in this old WeHo building mixing products with alcohol from giant oil drums. When the drums ran out we'd give them away to people on Craigslist who looked like they made meth.
7) Then one day, Harmony suddenly showed up with several kids. Who was the dad? We never knew anything about her personal life. She just showed up and filled the office with a bizarre assortment of her personal furniture including a large fridge with tons of stuff in the freezer.
8) She was a surprisingly young & tiny woman & while friendly on the surface... she was secretive. Once she was in LA, we never knew when she'd show up.
One weekend the power in the building went out and when we showed up on Monday whatever was in the freezer had gone rancid.
One weekend the power in the building went out and when we showed up on Monday whatever was in the freezer had gone rancid.
9) The building manager told us we had to get rid of the smell *right away* so we tossed several bags of things we couldn't identify into the trash. Later that day Harmony showed up and we told her what happened. Her face dropped and went ghostly pale. She stammered.
10) "You... you didn't throw away what was in the freezer, did you?" We explained we had to and she seemed to have a breakdown. "What was in the freezer?" we asked her. She wouldn't tell us. "I have to go... I have to go..." she said and left. She didn't come back that day.
11) What did we throw away that could have made her so upset? We never got an answer.
12) We never brought up that day with her again. Based on her reaction and her secrecy, it was clear we shouldn't.
Anyway, Harmony would work crazy hours in the middle of the night and almost always be gone by morning.
Anyway, Harmony would work crazy hours in the middle of the night and almost always be gone by morning.
13) Then one day a friend who actually worked a shift with Harmony (which was rare) said Harmony told her someone had broken into her apartment but stolen nothing. She said it was a message from someone. Just to show her "I know where you live." She didn't offer a guess of who.
14) "They didn't even take my duffle on the bed with $10,000 of emergency cash" she told my friend. She said it in a very casual way as if *everyone* had $10,000 in emergency cash in a duffle on their bed.
15) Very shortly after this, Harmony disappeared again, leaving her furniture behind. I never saw her again. I started teaching improv classes and no longer needed to work at the weird company anymore so I quit. A few years later the office closed and was finally torn down.
16) To this day, I wonder what we threw out of the freezer, but I'll probably never know.
17) Why did I work at this crazy job for so long? Well, in typical LA fashion it offered flexible hours, and that's all you can hope for in LA. THE END.
