I worked for a while at the Richmond Plasma Corporation on Broad Street in Richmond Virginia in the late 70’s. Our clients would “donate” plasma and we would pay them for their time and trouble.
A very sweet young guy named Raymond was a regular donor. He was always polite and never gave us any trouble. Raymond was unfortunately homeless and his donation was a regular income for him.
In the middle of a particularly hot Richmond summer Raymond came in to donate. Heads all over the waiting area popped up as Raymond made his way to the reception desk. His body odor that day was overpowering. Blow your mind, make your eyes water, make your head ache overpowering. The kind of scent that makes you wonder if it’s really happening.
A few of our clients walked out immediately, others glared at me expecting me to do something.
I took Raymond outside to explain (on of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do) that he couldn’t donate that day because he was so stinky. He listened politely and told me that he would clean up and come back.
Raymond came back.
Have you ever smelled Right Guard deodorant? Raymond didn’t wash - he went to a drug store and sprayed Right Guard over the stinky stuff. The result was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. (Raymond was told to come back after hours to donate - the other clients couldn’t take it and I was the tech who took his plasma that night. I still have nightmares)
What’s the stinkiest odor you’e ever encountered?
Putrescine [or what ever the combo is in a dead human corpse that had been outside in the summer in the deep south.]
Although butyric acid came pretty close.
Raymond sounds pretty rank. I’ve had the displeasure of B.O. ranging from unwashed and sweaty to sick and soiled. None compares to the skunk at close range or plain ammonia in close quarters. Rotting garbage coupled with the sulfur stink of decomposition of flesh is also hard to breathe around.
But I can’t remember a specific time and place for the foulest yet. I must have managed to repress it.
Smelly (Stinky) tofu is without a doubt the most pungent and repulsive thing I’ve ever smelled. I have eaten just about anything and everything else but there’s no way I could try this stuff.
My landlord from many years ago accidentally spilled the contents of a diaper pail down the front stairs. It had evidently been fermented for a few days, and the odor was unbelievable (and I’ve experienced a lot of bad odors over the years). I couldn’t believe that mere baby waste could produce an odor that bad.
I’m sure I’ve smelled a few rank odors, but I discovered one recently that has pushed other memories aside, at least temporarily.
I played paintball for the first time in my life a couple of weeks ago. Near the end of the day, we walked down to a speedball field. As we crossed from the walkway onto the field itself, we walked through this patch of…well…I don’t know what you’d call it. It had the texture of mud, but the odor was so vile that I don’t have the adjectives (or expletives).
According to the referee who was with us, it was a combination of regular mud and whatever the components of the exploded paintballs are that smelled so foul. All I know is that I never want to smell it again. I still haven’t cleaned my shoes off from that day – I’ve just left them in a location that doesn’t offend.
When I was in 7th grade, there was an old crazy lady who lived down the road from us. Her husband had died and she apparently just let everything go. She was eventually committed so my cousin and I went poking around on her property.
There was a carport filled to the ceiling with garbage bags, but we steered clear of that…
There was a chicken coop full of dead of chickens, which was ghastly to look at, but it had been long enough that the smell was mostly gone, just bones and feathers six inches deep.
In the back, behind the house, there was this chest freezer. You know the kind that open from the top? Her electricity had been out for who knows how long… This was summertime, in Arkansas.
We opened it. And looked in.
Well, it had apparently been full of meat, wrapped in butcher paper, but now it was just half full of rotten meat juice. The summer heat had created a positive pressure in there, so the stench just rolled out and smacked us both square in the face, at the same time, HARD.
I can’t describe it, nothing would do it justice, I’m not that poetic. Suffice it to say we both ran all the way home without ever looking back.
Over 20 years later and I’m gagging just thinking about it.
Well, I’m a public librarian, and I smell during the summer a lot of unwashed people. Mostly I don’t even smell it anymore, but sometimes… wow.
The worst smell I’ve ever smelled, however, was when a friend and I went to Daytona Beach for Spring Break several years ago, and we took a cooler. And we had a bunch of beer and lunch meat in the cooler. And when we came back, we had terrible colds and didn’t immediately clean the cooler out. And then we were afraid to do it. So I rode around for a couple months (in the summer) with it in the trunk. That car is now in Florida with my mom and it still smells. Eventually I took the cooler out of the trunk and put it in the garage, because I thought that would fix the car smell. (It did not, of course.) Well, a few months after that I came home to see my dad out in the driveway poking something with a shovel. Yes, he’d innocently opened the cooler. I didn’t even get the first wave of smell - I got there after it had been dumped out, and it was still the worst thing I’ve ever smelled.
While it can’t possiblt be as bad as some of the things mentioned here, I submit kitten farts.
Our new little fur baby has the face of an angel, and the butthole of Satan. Such a small little critter, but she can clear a room. She even manages to out-do my boyfriend…and that’s real talent.
About 20 years ago I spent six weeks in London. One day I was in the grocery store, in line to pay for my items. I detected an extremely strong BO from the lady in front of me, and when I turned to go find another line, a person walked up behind me who smelled far more toxic than the lady in front. I was basically trapped in the line between two of the most vile stenches I had ever encountered.
At one point I had a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Every now and then a mouse would skitter along the floor and disappear into a hole behind the radiator, so I set out a series of traps smeared with peanut butter. Fast forward about 6 months and I’m away for the Thanksgiving weekend. I return Sunday night, open the door to my apartment, and am bowled over by the smell- evidently little Micky met his demise in one of the traps, and judging from the degree of stink, it must have happened just after I left on Wednesday evening. Couple this with the fact that over the weekend, a water main had broken up the street, so there was no water to clean up the carcass and puddle of dried blood. It was not a happy ending to a holiday weekend, for either of us.
I used to have a summer job working with my grandfather. Real estate agencies would hire us to remodel buildings so that they could be sold for business use.
One summer we were hired to remodel a country music dance club and bar that had closed down six months prior. There was no power to this building, as it had been shut off six months ago when the business went under. We walked into the building and immediately noticed a foul smell. We followed the stink to a large walk-in freezer. The door had a padlock on it that we had to cut off. We opened the door and were just about felled by the horrible, horrible stench. This freezer was full of hundreds of pounds of steak that had been sitting inside this freezer for six months rotting in the summer heat. :smack: We could see maggots crawling all over the steaks, and it was almost as though you could see the stink waves coming off of this rotted meat. Both my grandpa and I immediately started gagging, and I really that I was going to fall over.
We immediately slammed the door to the freezer closed and headed to the hardware store for disposable coveralls and masks so that we could breath. We also bought several gallons of bleach to spray all over the freezer and meat before we went in and started working with it.
It took several days of scrubbing to get all of the stink out of this freezer. That was the last summer I ever worked with my grandpa.
The smell of rotting chicken and other assorted trash fermenting in the bottom of the trash can is pretty bad, but it still doesn’t beat the time my boyfriend’s dog got full-force skunked right outside our back door. It wasn’t just that “ew” smell that you get driving by a dead skunk in the road. It was a horrible, toxic, overpowering, gag-inducing stench that literally drove us and the next-door neighbors out of our homes. My neighbor thought that there was some kind of chemical spill or gas leak because it smelled so bad that you almost couldn’t smell it (or maybe what I mean is you couldn’t identify it.). You were simply compelled to get the hell out of there. We left the dog tied to the fence for the entire day when the smell had finally dissipated to the point where we could return. The only redeeming part of the whole experience was laughing at how ashamed the dog was after that. You could tell he was absolutely mortified. Poor guy.
I was in Florida (Destin, to be exact) with my family for a vacation. A week in mid-June. My cousin came along.
One night, my cousin and I decide to walk the beach at night. We stayed in Destin by old Highway 98 (I think) and it’s a 2-lane road right off the beach. We were walking down the road looking for steps down to the beach.
We walk by one of the many seafood restaurants on the beach, and get hit by a nauseating smell. The dumpster from one of the restaurants.
It smelled like (warning: nasty description!!!)
like a chick on the rag that doesn’t shower, rotting meat/seafood and fish + baked in 90 degree weather
It was horrible. We made sure to avoid that area for the rest of the trip.
Decomposition. No matter what else I’ve smelled, this is the number one worst smell ever. Cleaning up deer bodies from the sides of the road in the middle of the summer, some of which had sat dead and rotting in the sun for days before we could get to them. If they weren’t already exploded, we really tried hard not to explode them as we picked them up on shovels and got them off the roads. Sometimes, they would pop anyway.
Second worst smell ever: severe burns. Third degree burns that I caught a whiff of when a trauma patient was brought into the UPMC Presby ER once while I was there. It was a bad smell, the charred flesh, and made quite a bit worse by knowing that it was a living person that this happened to. Still, not as bad as decomposition of a body. Even guys on that crew who didn’t smoke would light one up before grabbing the shovel and going after the roadkill.