I've never had the soapy cilantro thing, until I was at a Thai restaurant once, and had a cilantro based dish that really tasted like soap. I was terrified that I didn't like cilantro anymore, but when I had some later, it was fine. I don't know if it was a particular strain of cilantro, but everyone else who had the dish liked it.

Cilantro tastes like soap to me but I can take it in tiny amounts. What does it taste like to non-soapy people?

Oh, I once bought lavender scented dish-soap and that was a huge error. The scent on the dishes made my food taste off.

Yeah, there are lots of dish soaps I avoid for exactly that reason. I can put up with my dishes smelling faintly like citrus, but lavender or roses or a tropical rainforest? DO NOT WANT.

What does it taste like to non-soapy people?

Um... an herb? I am the complete opposite of a super-taster. The most I can say is that it's herby and pleasant, or herby and inoffensive. Too much of it and the whole dish tastes, I guess, kind of like lawn clippings and soap, but it has to be way, way too much for me to even begin to notice.

Cilantro tastes kind of like parsley, but different.

What does it taste like to non-soapy people?

Fresh lovely heaven. Imagine parsley being more... fragrant? In your mouth-wise? Very bright and clean.

I drove down to meet the peach truck this morning and got one of the last boxes of Georgia peaches! They are perfect! What do I do with them? Pie? Crisp? Cobbler?

I need to decide soon before Liv eats them all.

So does someone skilled in office politics want to advise me? I just don't know what to do about My Nemesis.

To wit: the managers almost uniformly think the sun shines out her ass. However her pattern with people on her own level is to take as much work away from them as possible, so she looks really great, but do only that work which makes her look good to the managers, undercut her coworkers via slyly-worded emails, fail to update anyone on what she's doing, lie about whether she's getting the work done, lie about whether a project was hers if there's trouble associated with it, refuse to use the network or save any emails (so that nobody can tell whether she's working on anything), lie to clients and outside entities about the status of work, claim letters and emails never arrived, and jump forward to claim projects that look high-profile. To be fair, when she does get the work done, it's generally fine--but she can't possibly do it all.

The other day I sent her as politely-worded an email as I could, asking for the status of thirteen projects she was supposed to be doing for me. I cc'd my current boss (whose last day is today) and my apparently-future boss. She does not answer to either of them, but to the micro-managing former division chief who officially has no more power but who in fact still seems to be running the division.

And in the middle of that, she's taken on half the workload of a coworker who is retiring today. It's not physically possible for her to get all the work done she's taken on, but she keeps reaching for it! And the managers appear to think the place will fall apart if she leaves.

Whereas I think that it's really bad management to let anyone get that important to the function of the organization, because what if they get hit by a bus?

I don't want to get her fired, I just want to stop her from sabotaging me, and actually get my work done. So I can stop stewing over her and behaving like a petty high school student.

I have no idea what to do, because no matter how often I CC my boss on my exchanges with her, nothing happens. I try to document our exchanges, but it's so easy to see it as some sort of "personal dispute" instead of an orchestrated campaign to make herself appear indispensable and other people incompetent. And it's clear that nobody senior to me has any interest in actually managing her.

I guess vinegar is the only thing I'm particularly taste-sensitive to. After our office coffee maker has been washed out with it the coffee tastes unpleasantly sour to me for a couple of days. Meanwhile, I can't detect a difference between coffee made with bottled water and the tap water others object to.

Thankfully balsamic vinegar tastes fine to me in salad dressing, but I can't even stand the smell of the regular stuff.

Consuela, can you just ignore when she's "taking over" work that you know she'll never do, and then just make everyone know when you've done whatever it is? I don't know -- I've never figured out how to effectively deal with someone when the higher-ups think they shit rainbows.