For me I would say raw sewage; for a long time I had always thought sewage would smell like poop…I never imagined it could smell worse . Close on the list is tonsoliths, those smell pretty rank.
For some reason dog poop smells way worse to me than human poop. I will practically throw up if I smell dog poop, but human poop is just perceived as a really really bad smell.
When I was a candy striper there was a man brought in with gangrene on his leg…oh the smell still haunts me…dead flesh…ick!
Oh and my cats have been known to pack quite a wallop into their little steaming shit piles…
Margo
College house during the summer. Our lease was almost up, and we were all pretty much moved out early. No one was really sleeping there anymore, everyone was already set up at other places. But, we still had food in the refrigerator.
For some reason the roomate in charge of the electric bill decided to get it shut off early. He neglected to tell the other roomates. It was about 2 weeks of no elecricity before I stopped in to clean out the fridge. The temperature was probably in the '90s for those 2 weeks.
The rotten food smell was by far the worst thing I’ve ever encountered. I would have vomitted had I not ran outside to fresh air immediately (I still almost did).
Because my roomates were kind of dumbasses and real lazy too, I ended up being the one who had to clean out the fridge. I was still smelling it days after I was out of there.
Right, this is probably TMI, but the worst smell I ever encountered was something produced by my own body (which is probably why I found it so disgusting). Up until last fall, I had a sebaceous cyst on my back that had been growing for a number of years, and that I kept putting off getting taken care of. One night it was feeling a bit sore, so I reached my hand back to rub it. Bad move. The cyst erupted, and over the next week much foul smelling material was expelled. Subsequent research revealed that what was inside the cyst was a material called sebum, which is the oily material produced by your skin. This was like the core of the Mother of All Zits, allowed to sit and stew in its own juices for years. Just writing about it I can smell it again. Ugh.
Come on Incubus, It’s not that bad. I had to work in the town council, which involved travelling to the oxidation ponds every day - during summer. Oh, and jumping down a sewage main to fit a stopper for flow testing. Ah yes, fun days…
Any chemists around here? Does the phrase metacaptha-ethnaol rings any bells? For the non-sciency types, imagine the worst fart you’ve every smelt. Now add two dozen rotten eggs, a two month old garbage bag and a heft dose of Foul 'ole Ron. Oh and it’s toxic too.
Then there’s my flatmate. It’s an odd b.o./old fart/mould/sweat and something else my other flat mate and I have never found out.
Not worst, but most powerful was when I stuck my nose in a jar of horseradish and inhaled.
Dead, rotting sheep smell foul beyond belief.
Fluid (actually more a semi-solid) aspirated from an empyema.
It’s a tie between the time when my dog rolled around in a very rotten fish and some old cauliflower in the fridge.
I once came across a dead deer in the woods. Horrors.
The consensus seems to be that rotting flesh is the worst smell ever. Good to know.
One of the bodies we were working on at the lab apparently wasn’t adequately prepared, so when we opened the abdomen we got a nice big whiff of formaldehyde and rotting human remains. Lovely.
This is a weird one… but whenever I’m washing dishes, and there is anything that held tomato sauce in it, the combination smell of tomato sauce and dish detergent makes me gag. Seriously, it’s hard to breathe. I don’t know why, even if I rationalise “It’s not that gross, it’s just sauce and soap!”… still I gag. The SMELL… ugh.
The only other time I’ve ever experienced that “I-can’t-breathe-it-smells-so-bad” urgency was when my ex-roommate’s friend took off his boots at our house. Yow!
I’ve actually never smelled rotting flesh. (Knock wood.)
The 10-gallon bucket of brain cross-sections that had become contaminated over the summer. Whew!
Anything I work with that contains amines and/or sulfur runs a very close second. [SUB]SDS with mercaptoethanol… yikes![/SUB]
Once, I was walking down to the BP with a friend to get something to drink. It was a very hot, humid summer day. On the way, we passed by some roadkill. Oh GOD did that REEK!!! It was so hideous! I felt like I was going to throw up.
I was a garbage man for five years. I have smelt it all.
You’ld be amazed the various smells that eminate from a garbage can that has been baking in the sun for a week straight.
There was the 5 gallon bucket that contained three fish. The maggots had eaten through the top two and were presumably heading for the last one. Nasty I tell ya. There was a 40 quart cooler that, while it looked good on the outside, I opened it t find melted ice cream, sandwhichs, hot dogs, and an exploded beer. It was moving from the amount of maggots in there. In case your wondering, maggots not only eat nastyness, tehy produce even nastier stuff as a by product.
the worst had to be when at the end of the week we had to climb into the back of the truck and clean out what had worked itself behind the large pushout panel. A week of various goo and grossness having to be dug out. You name it and it was back there. In the summer time, it had to be done in short bursts so you could stick your head out and get some fresh air.
I now work in an office.
One night, my college roommate and I stuffed ourselves on mexican food. Then he went out and got shitfaced drunk. Some folks dropped him off at the door about 2am. I gave him some water, watched him for about 15-20 minutes, then figured the coast was clear and I could send him to bed. So I shoved him up the ladder to the top bunk. Decided it was late, and got in bed also. Five minutes later, lying in the dark, I hear a BLURGHGHGFUURGHGHGFUUUUAAAHHHH from above me. The resulting two foot diameter puddle of orange, alcohol-filled vomit was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. Honorable mention goes to the roadkilled armadillo I happened upon one hot Texas summer day.
I worked in a dog grooming place for a summer and one time this lady brought in her dog for bath…he had been rolling in the rotting remains of some kind of long dead animal all morning.
Just last saturday I was sitting on the couch between my husband and my 7 year old son. Both were for some reason overly gassy. My son emmited a stench so terrible that he got up and moved to the end of the couch stating “OH my god it smells real bad over there!”
I am thinking they have begun to prematurely decompose- nothing else but rotting flesh could ever smell so bad.
Durian. NOt fresh either, but previously frozen North American bought durian
Oh gods this was bad.
Whe I first started to cut it open, didn’t smell a thing. Continued to cut, nada. I was begining to believe the clerk that we had at the store where I got it. SHe said that these ones didn’t smell too bad.
She was wrong.
Very wrong.
All of a sudden a cloud enveloped me. No warning, no “what the…?” moment, just… smell.
It hit me like a punch. Staggered me. I just couldn’t believe it. IT was more than just an unpleasant smell. I was prepared for that. It was more than a smell. It had texture. It had depth. HEll, it had a friggin’ personality. You’ve heard of hysterical blidness? I had hystericall non-smellness (? is that even a word?). COuldn’t smell a thing. Except when I got close to the damn thing. Funny thing was, unless you were right by it you couldn’t smell it at all. It didn’t diffuse at all, thankfully. It just had this massive stink aura.
All I can say in my defense is that it seemed like a good idea at the time…
Urk…
We used to live about a block away from where a potato processing plant pumped their waste water onto acres of open fields. On hot summer evenings we would open the windows to let in the cool night air but instead we got blasted by rotten potato stench. Uckk!! We moved a couple of miles away but we can still smell it sometimes when there is a breeze.