“I don’t smell,” I confessed to a friend.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said, holding his nose.

“No, not that,” I said. “I might stink, but my nose doesn’t pick up scents very well. At least that’s what I’ve been told.”

“Let me guess,” my buddy said. “Your wife told you that your sniffer was out of order.”

I nodded.

“Yep,” he said. “My wife’s olfactory nerves are honed to perfection, while mine are not quite up to sniff. I mean, snuff. That’s why I declare myself the winner.”

“How so?”

“Unless I’m right on top of it and concentrating, I cannot smell rotten food in the pantry, dirty diapers on a baby or soiled socks under the bed,” he said. “She picks up that unpleasantness all the time. What kind of life is that?”

“Good point,” I said. “Aromatic ignorance helped me survive an all-male dorm in college.”

“My wife, Pam,” he said. “She says her keen sense of scent could save our lives by detecting hot smells ready to burst into flames.

“The thing is, she sends ME in search of these smells, especially at 3 in the morning. I beg for a hint. She hollers, ‘What do you mean where? Follow your nose!’ My nose always takes me back to bed.”

“How does that go over?” I asked.

“Ignoring smells that I can’t smell apparently isn’t the right answer. In my defense, we’ve never had the fire.”

“So, no problem,” I said.

“Problem,” he said. “Pammy started gagging when she caught me using the same bath towel for the 37th shower in a row. According to her calculations, I was drying with more mildew and mold than towel.

“‘Can’t you smell anything?’ she yelped. I buried my nose in the towel and inhaled. After some consideration, I guessed, ‘Root beer?’ She screamed and locked herself in the bedroom.”

According to my favorite medical journal, Reader’s Digest, it turns out there is actual scientific proof that men and women possess different powers of smell. According to research, men actually cannot detect some scents.

A good, solid smell — such as an egg salad and bologna sandwich left behind the couch for three weeks — technically consists of many different odors all packaged into one, high-impact punch in the nose. Women can pretty much distinguish every single odor in the pugnant package, while a man, thankfully, cannot. In fact, according to the study, for many of us dulled-sensed guys, after you eliminate all the scent portions we can’t smell, what remains can be quite pleasant.

“So, like you said, we win,” I said.

He grinned. “Pam asked me once, ‘Doesn’t it frustrate you to know that your nose doesn’t work?’ I told her it works wonderfully by not working. Outside of hot fudge and Play-Doh, there’s not all that much that’s worth smelling anyway. Besides, it always sniffs to attention when it counts.

“One night, I returned home at 1 a.m. from an extra-innings baseball game. A wafting scent grabbed my interest. I searched the house until I found a roast tucked into the back of the refrigerator. I conquered it and went to bed.

“Pam complained the next day that she’d been up late doing laundry and that last load with its spring-fresh dryer sheet finished its spin not too many minutes before I walked in. She wondered how it was that I couldn’t smell fresh laundry that needed folding, but that I could ferret out the roast she’d hidden away for supper.”

“Oh, I know the answer to this one,” I said. “Laundry smells like work. Roast smells like a party in your mouth. Men cannot smell unpleasant smells. What other scientific proof is necessary?”

Sniff out Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.