Worst smell ever...........

[oscarsear]

Having survived a career caring for human sickness and the like I feel somewhat qualified to discourse upon the subject of malodour. Perhaps it is just that this was the malodour du-jour but this peculiarly piquant episode merits discussion IMHO. I have 2 dogs, Ernie and Cisco. They're nice dogs. As with most animals they eat and they expel excrement and they are subject to their own varietal illnesses. No big deal there. As they are well behaved animals they do their bidding out of doors, good, bad or indifferent. And being the meticulous old-man, anal-retentive, gardener-sort I pick up after them 2 to 4 times daily, PRN. No big surprise there. For this necessary chore I employ a Disneyland-esque doody picker-upper and a lidded, air tight plastic can which itself is lined with a disposable plastic bag. I dispose of said -pooter- waste bag in the weekly trash pick up and replace it with a brandy new fresh plastic bag. All good stuff, neat and reasonably clean. In fact during the winter I can go for weeks at a time without any untoward side affects. Well spring/summer brings many joys and also its problems. It was a unique week for my house. For starts the boys were sickly. That means puked up piles of partially digested Science Diet (Lamb and Rice Kibbles) as well as the concomitant slurry-ish mucous laden stools, all deposited out-of-doors and expediently gathered-up by yours truly and dutifully disposed of. Well as a matter of convenience most any snippets of back yard trashy stuff also goes in that same receptacle. This week that included various foliage clippings and 1 dead pocket gopher and 1 dead robin. The dead animals were freshly dead whence initially deposited and I thought nothing about the circumstances. I do not get many dead animals and what else was I gonna do with them anyway? Of course as the week progressed so did the daily temperature, to a steady mid-80's. Said air-tight bucket was exposed to roughly 8 hours of intense sunlight. Needless to say as trash pick-up day approached things were getting a tad aromatically challenged. Two days before the scheduled trash day I innocently added a single huge slug to the gathering mire. Sadly I have to admit that it was not dead when so deposited. Killing it would have been icky and despite its massive size it was slow enough to capture. It was regretful in retrospect but it was not maliciously undertaken. BTW I live in the northwest and believe it or not the slug is Washington states official state bug (or whatever). I live in Idaho but it is close enough. This collection of dog puke, dog diarrhea, dead and alive animals and rotting foliage was awful and smelled ghastly, I mean putrid beyond description. Honestly I think it was the dog food puke. And then it happened. The 4th of July. Trash day got delayed by a single hot day. That was just enough time to allow a Russian sized horde of maggots to blossom into an explosion of exudative, off-gassing squirming sludge. As it so happened I made that one final doo-doo run before removing that bag. The dogs were better and I was just blissfully happy to see formed semisolid excrement. I was expecting a blast of badness as I unlatched that bucket. What I got - was - shall we say - palpably unfortunate and unforgettable. Knowing y'all care about my life and its finer points I thought this should be shared here because I also care about you, each and every one of you. Do not do what I done did. Ever. Though I expect that cable TeeVee's celebrity coroner Dr. 'G' has experienced worse odors it ain't by much. Gack!!

[Coytee]

Stupid me...

I just got done making 2 burgers on the grill...ate them... sitting back with nice full stomach.... and was curious as to what you'd have to say.

[+o(]

[elitedemo]

Definitely to hot to let all of those goods cook up for a week, just our garbage alone in the garage is terrible with the little kids diapers.

A handful of years ago when I was still renting I had moved closer to a new job. It's summertime just like now only not quite as hot, without the air on the upstairs would reach 100-110 on any given summerday. We finish loading up the uhual, lock everything up, and head off to the new place. 3 weeks go by and I get a call from the previous landlord saying there was a horrible smell coming from the apartment we had vacated. We still had keys and were going to do a final cleanup the last week so no big deal told him I'd take a look and see. We drive back out to the old place and having a walkout porch and steps to a bedroom I go up that route, to my suprise I can smell something terrible 15 ft away from the house walking up. As I get to the door to unlock it I have to put my shirt over my face to try to avoid sniffing in the worst odor I've ever dealt with. I open the door and see quite litterly 1000s of flys everywhere and am overwhelmed by the odor. I quickly shut the door as I am gagging and nearly puking. I run out to the car to grab some garbage bags and cleaners that I had brought along and quickly realize that I may have come underprepared.

Luckily I had some cologne in a box in the backseat of the car as well and zap a few shots under my shirt as to further mask the smell and pull it above my face. I proceed back up the stairs and quickly open half of the windows before I am overwhelmed again and have to run outside for fresh air. I run back to get the rest of the windows and upon running into the kitchen notice the freezer door is wide open and the flys are in there the most. I look into the freezer and notice ooze everywhere in there along with on the floor and on the opposite wall nearly 15ft away has spots all over. I can see maggets crawling all over inside the freezer and when I open up the fridge they are in there as well.

I ran back outside to get some gloves and garbage bags for the oozey puddle and exploded bags of which I couldn't quite figure out what they were until picking them up and letting the ooze fall off of them. 2 turkeys probably 10-15lbs each had been left in the freezer and had exploded sending the liquid cocktail in every direction, my guess the first one blew the door open and the second one made the real splatter in the kitchen. It seems during the move someone unplugged the fridge and I was just going to throw the turkeys out during the cleanup. Hours turn into a full day trying to cleanup the mess. The fridge gets left with such a bad odor through its entire guts that it needs to be disposed of. Beleive it or not they still had downstairs tenants in this building. I cant' imagine someone staying anywhere near that building when I was gagging outside of it.

[Utard]

Reminds me of my tree in the back yard

It is a Ginko tree. It is a living fossil.

It is said they only sell male trees but after 40 years I guess it was tired of that and switched sides.

Now it is a female and makes these lovely little berries about the size of a ping pong ball.

In the fall when they fall and you step on them It reminds me of a drunk mouse that puked and then died in a used baby diaper.

So don't get a Ginko tree.

[Doc Robin]

A bag of lime works wonders on stuff like that.

With this heat I have been taking the household trash to the dumpster at the son-in-laws shop just as soon as a bag is full. It's a lot better than waiting for the weekly trash pick up. With 2 grand kids in diapers coming over everyday it gets ripe pretty fast.

Bill

GO HOGS

[wuzzzer]

A very long time ago my Dad bought some smelt to use for fishing. It was a package of probably 10 of them. We went fishing and only used a couple of them and didn't get anything using them. The package of smelt was put in a 5 gallon pail that had other fishing stuff in it and as we were packing up to leave various items were stacked on the smelt, hiding it inside the pail. We kept all our fishing equipment in the basement tucked way under the stairway.

Fast forward a few weeks later I went down to check something in the fishing equipment area and I smelled this awful smell. I found the culprit - the package of smelt rotting away. I brought it upstairs and said something to my Mom about finding it and she said "Put that back in the freezer." Apparently she thought I had removed the package from the freezer and she wanted me to put it back.

She had a home office in our house and she didn't make it back to the room that the freezer was in until later in the day. She started gagging and was yelling at me about what on earth smelled so bad? I told her that it was the smelt that she told me to put in the freezer.

End result was that almost everything in that freezer was thrown out that day. It was a horrible smell.

[jhoak]

In the late 70s I managed a Radio Shack store in Casselberry, FL. Two doors down in the shopping center was a little oyster bar named Peekers. They were VERY popular and sold a LOT of oysters. I ate there frequently.

My store, the store next to me and Peekers all shared the same dumpster out behind the center.

Lets just say that a half a ton of oyster shells sitting in a dark green dumpster on a hot Florida day can put off a considerable funk.[+o(]

Thankfully being the store manager I was able to delegate "trash duty" to one of my sales guys.[]

[oldtimer]

A very long time ago my Dad bought some smelt to use for fishing. It was a package of probably 10 of them. We went fishing and only used a couple of them and didn't get anything using them. The package of smelt was put in a 5 gallon pail that had other fishing stuff in it and as we were packing up to leave various items were stacked on the smelt, hiding it inside the pail. We kept all our fishing equipment in the basement tucked way under the stairway.

Fast forward a few weeks later I went down to check something in the fishing equipment area and I smelled this awful smell. I found the culprit - the package of smelt rotting away. I brought it upstairs and said something to my Mom about finding it and she said "Put that back in the freezer." Apparently she thought I had removed the package from the freezer and she wanted me to put it back.

She had a home office in our house and she didn't make it back to the room that the freezer was in until later in the day. She started gagging and was yelling at me about what on earth smelled so bad? I told her that it was the smelt that she told me to put in the freezer.

End result was that almost everything in that freezer was thrown out that day. It was a horrible smell.

Off topic but I had a pet frog called Lloyd (Sea Hunt was popular then) that after he died I wrapped in foil and put in the freezer. Weeks later I heard a scream of surprise from my mom in the kitchen---she had unwrapped Lloyd not knowing he was ever there.

On topic we came home from vacation one summer to find a dead turtle in the terrarium. Now there's a smell for the ages. Apparently the person designated to look in was a little slack.

[twistedcrankcammer]

Prior to going to college, I used to work in a food warehouse. In the summer times 110 degrees was not uncomon. When it got this hot, alot of the canned dog food would start to rot inside the can and the cans would explode, already filled with families of the largest maggots I have ever seen. The stench has made me vomit more than once.

Roger

[oscarsear]

Fun stories, one and all. Wife #1 and I received a cheap-o box of chocolates as a gratuitous gift one holiday season. It was all wrapped in cellophane, etc............ Oddly the package was warm to the touch. Opened that thing up and it was half loaded with maggots. They apparently survived commercial processing inside a nut. The smell wasn't that bad but it certainly squelched any sweet tooth interests.

[ZAKO]

mmmmmmmm !! Makes my mouth water,,!!

[Marvel]

For me the worst ever was while working as a TV news photographer in Memphis. A Navy officer had his wife killed, and her body was left in the trunk of her car. The car was left in the parking lot of one of the public libraries. Summer sun and a few days had passed when a passerby noticed the smell.

Most of the homicide detectives carried cheap cigars they could inhale while in the vicinity of dead bodies, as it helped to somewhat disguise the smell. Otherwise, most of them would lose their lunch... [+o(]

Bruce

[tube fanatic]

Being the charming individual that I am (?!), my grad school room mate and I got bored one night and tossed a quarter sized lump of limburger cheese into a friend's oven to see what would happen. The next day he decided to cook a TV dinner. To make a long story short, the entire 3 story building in which we lived was evacuated and the fire department called. I still find the incident humorous...........The dean of the school wasn't impressed at all. We still don't know after all these decades how he figured that we were involved (although it may be related to another incident in which we tied into the building's intercom system at 3 am, but that's another story.)

[fini]

Having survived a career caring for human sickness and the like I feel somewhat qualified to discourse upon the subject of malodour. Perhaps it is just that this was the malodour du-jour but this peculiarly piquant episode merits discussion IMHO. I have 2 dogs, Ernie and Cisco. They're nice dogs. As with most animals they eat and they expel excrement and they are subject to their own varietal illnesses. No big deal there. As they are well behaved animals they do their bidding out of doors, good, bad or indifferent. And being the meticulous old-man, anal-retentive, gardener-sort I pick up after them 2 to 4 times daily, PRN. No big surprise there. For this necessary chore I employ a Disneyland-esque doody picker-upper and a lidded, air tight plastic can which itself is lined with a disposable plastic bag. I dispose of said -pooter- waste bag in the weekly trash pick up and replace it with a brandy new fresh plastic bag. All good stuff, neat and reasonably clean. In fact during the winter I can go for weeks at a time without any untoward side affects. Well spring/summer brings many joys and also its problems. It was a unique week for my house. For starts the boys were sickly. That means puked up piles of partially digested Science Diet (Lamb and Rice Kibbles) as well as the concomitant slurry-ish mucous laden stools, all deposited out-of-doors and expediently gathered-up by yours truly and dutifully disposed of. Well as a matter of convenience most any snippets of back yard trashy stuff also goes in that same receptacle. This week that included various foliage clippings and 1 dead pocket gopher and 1 dead robin. The dead animals were freshly dead whence initially deposited and I thought nothing about the circumstances. I do not get many dead animals and what else was I gonna do with them anyway? Of course as the week progressed so did the daily temperature, to a steady mid-80's. Said air-tight bucket was exposed to roughly 8 hours of intense sunlight. Needless to say as trash pick-up day approached things were getting a tad aromatically challenged. Two days before the scheduled trash day I innocently added a single huge slug to the gathering mire. Sadly I have to admit that it was not dead when so deposited. Killing it would have been icky and despite its massive size it was slow enough to capture. It was regretful in retrospect but it was not maliciously undertaken. BTW I live in the northwest and believe it or not the slug is Washington states official state bug (or whatever). I live in Idaho but it is close enough. This collection of dog puke, dog diarrhea, dead and alive animals and rotting foliage was awful and smelled ghastly, I mean putrid beyond description. Honestly I think it was the dog food puke. And then it happened. The 4th of July. Trash day got delayed by a single hot day. That was just enough time to allow a Russian sized horde of maggots to blossom into an explosion of exudative, off-gassing squirming sludge. As it so happened I made that one final doo-doo run before removing that bag. The dogs were better and I was just blissfully happy to see formed semisolid excrement. I was expecting a blast of badness as I unlatched that bucket. What I got - was - shall we say - palpably unfortunate and unforgettable. Knowing y'all care about my life and its finer points I thought this should be shared here because I also care about you, each and every one of you. Do not do what I done did. Ever. Though I expect that cable TeeVee's celebrity coroner Dr. 'G' has experienced worse odors it ain't by much. Gack!!

A beautiful piece of writing. I felt as though I was right there in that air-tight pail.