I imagine it all happened one evening when an inventor, let’s call him, Missed the Mark (or just Mark for short) was bored. Mark had listened to all his CDs, and had watched all his DVDs. “There is just nothing new to listen to or hear on those disks,” he thought to himself. “It’s too bad you can’t use the disks for other senses than sight and hearing. Wait a minute …. Why not make a disk player for smells? You could play a sea shore or a forest or whatever. It would be great!”

And so the idea of a scent disk player was born in that moment of crazy inspiration.

Surprisingly, Febreze bought the idea and is marketing it as “Scentstories”.

Play scents like you play music: Select the disc you want to play, insert it into the player, close the lid and push play. As the disc plays, a quiet fan rotates through five scents, one every 30 minutes over the course of 2.5 hours. The player shuts off automatically after all five scents have been played. You can stop the player or skip through the scent tracks at any time. Discs are interchangeable and reusable.

The Scentstories disk is what creates your new scent environment: Each disc theme uses five complementary scents to create a rich, engaging scent experience. Because the scents change every 30 minutes, your nose never gets bored.

With the touch of a button, the multi-dimensional environment created by every Scentstories disc theme takes you there.

And since the discs are reusable, you can experience your favorite theme again and again.

Now I understand why the scent player is so important. We all know what trouble a nose can get into when it is bored. It starts sticking itself into other people’s business and everyone gets upset. It is much better to play some odors for a while and avoid the trouble.

But what multiple-scent experience disks are available?

• Exploring a mountain tail
• Wandering barefoot on the shore
• Strolling through the garden
• Relaxing in the hammock
• Shades of vanilla
• Celebrate the holidays

Surprisingly, Visiting the sauerkraut and horseradish factory isn’t include. Perhaps that is a disk to be offered in the future.

I’m holding out for Riding in a B-52 disk. I can tell you there would be some distinctive smells on that disk.

• Entering the plane: Experience the initial smells upon entering a plane that people have been getting sick in for more than forty years.
• Engine startup: Catch a whiff of the jet engine exhaust fumes as they are blown in your face.
• High Altitude Refueling: Now experience the light aroma of jet fuel.
• Low level bomb run: Here’s where the best action is. Smell the hot metal, jet engine exhaust fumes, electronics, and, well, maybe we could leave out one of the other smells that quite regularly showed up at this phase of the flight. It wouldn’t be realistic without it, but the disk might sell better without the smell of air sickness.
• Touch and Go: Now for a couple hours of relative calm and then blasting fumes in your face.

Now, I love electronics as much as the next person (possibly more) (OK, definitely more), but in this case, I think the old fashioned candles do just fine and don’t need to join the digital disk age.