Welcome back to ASU 101, the first class offered on ASU's Mars campus. And here's the man putting the "Eh?" in TA, me!
Thank you, thank you. Now for anyone who missed the first week of class, here's how this works: you e-mail me a question about ASU, Tempe or The State Press, and I answer it in this easy-to-swallow distance learning course. Believe it or not, I'm getting some good questions these days. Here's one now:
Q: What's the deal with the Subway smell? The Subway on University Drive is especially pungent; you can smell it all the way from Dave's Dog House. But any Subway you visit leaves your clothes smelling like, well, Subway. How do you get rid of that?
Every day health-conscious Sun Devils (and people like me who just like the meatballs) line up around the block to grind on a sandwich or the new Atkins-Friendly Wrap. And we all go to class smelling funny for at least an hour.
I did a lot of pondering about the issue, most of which involved me thinking about those tasty meatballs. Twenty-four inches of sub later, I smelled conspicuously like bread. I realized right then that I needed to find a way for students to easily and practically get rid of the smell.
That's when I remembered that ASU had an Unsteady Wind Tunnel. I thought if anything could knock the stench of Subway off a student, it would definitely be getting blasted with unsteady winds.
So I called up Professor William Saric, director of the wind tunnel complex. Much to my chagrin, he told me the tunnel had been decommissioned in 2003 to make room for the second biodesign building.
Even if the tunnel were still around, Saric said the Flight Research Center never permitted anyone inside. Apparently, journalists were always knocking on the door, trying to use the tunnel to see what it feels like to stick your head into a hurricane or tornado.
"My salary doesn't go high enough to authorize that kind of thing," Saric said.
But he added that the tunnel could, in theory, reduce the smell. He said the smell probably comes from the herbs and from glycol or alcohol in the bread, all of which settle on your skin and in your clothes as particulate matter. Typically, those particles would slowly diffuse into the air. High winds could convect those particles away much faster.
Erasing "goof around in wind tunnel" from my list of things to do before I graduate, I called up Subway for some professional advice.
A Subway employee, whose name I will not reveal to protect her future with the company, gave me the straight dope.
"Washing it doesn't even help," she said. Her uniform has retained its smell through more than three washings in a row. She recommended students use Febreze or a body spray to cover it up.
"Most of us go to school right after work," she said, "We still smell like Subway. And it's not good."
Just for kicks, I asked her if she would consider standing in the Unsteady Wind Tunnel's 75-mile-per-hour winds.
"I still don't think it would get rid of it," she said.
There you have it, good students. It is not humanly possible to get rid of the Subway smell.
Send your questions to the TA at ASU101@asu.edu.
