Forgotten items that give you an unpleasant surprise later...

[Marlitharn]

My mother had collected approximately four dozen goose eggs one time and stored them in egg cartons in the basement. I’m not sure why; I think she was planning to set them under hens or something. They sat there for months. One day I was in the next room, and I heard a soft “pop” followed by another pop, and another, and then several pops all together, accompanied by the most godawful retchifying stink in creation.

Every. Blessed. One. Of those eggs exploded. The smell was so bad my pet goat came to the back door and wrinkled his nose.

Then there was the time I left a sack of chicken livers in my dad’s tackle box for two weeks. In Missouri in August. He wasn’t happy with me.

[Larry_Mudd]

One summer vacation, when I was around twelve, my old man took me trawling in Horseshoe Bay. I guess we must have used too much weight on the line, because all we caught were mudsharks.

I wouldn’t hear of tossing them back, though, because they were sharks, man! Sharks! How cool is that?. So three mudsharks came back home with us in a big ol’ bucket of salt water. I was going to do something with them, I swear. Maybe I’d learn about taxidermy. More probably, I’d just cook the flesh of them and then bleach the bones. Cool! Shark bones!

Being a twelve-year-old, though, I just put the bucket in the crawl-space under our house in anticipation of the coming inspiration of exactly what I was going to do with them.

Then I went back to playing Colecovision games.

A few weeks later, the smell became noticeable inside the house. The crawlspace? The crawlspace was… unimaginable. For some reason, I’d put the bucket pretty far back in there. God alone knows what I was thinking. The space had less than four feet of headroom, and all the available air was palpably heavy with retch-inducing rotting fish stink. The injustice of the world being what it was, I was expected to deal with the problem, too. Parents. Sheesh.

I dug a big hole in the yard, which was the easy part. There was no way I was going to be able to reach the bucket without passing out. I tried to fix that by lobbing in to aerosol fresh-grenades: Pine-scented air-freshener with heavy rubber-bands holding valves open. As you might expect, it wasn’t really very helpful.

Eventually, I had to just hold my breath, run to the bucket, and then fetch it out as quickly as possible. Ever tried running, bent over, carrying a ten-gallon bucket filled to the brim with putrescent, liquified fish? It splashes. In your face, even.

I suppose I deserved it.

[Maxxxie]

Urgh. Some of these stories are making my stomach turn.

Onward to my tale! Some of you will have read my Tales of Mickey series, a bunch of stories about a recent mouse infestation in Casa Del Max.

MaxBabe’s sister had been house-sitting for us while we went on a brief holiday to Darwin. We’d told her about the mice and shown her how to load the mousetraps. We even showed her where all the traps were.

We came home, suitably rejuvenated from our holiday. MaxBabe’s sister went back to her place and we got back to our normal routine. A week or so later, I smelt something… funny. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It smelt a little like meat that’s been left out too long. But we didn’t have any meat in the house, and MaxBabe’s sister is a vegetarian, so we knew it wasn’t anything she’d brought into the house.

MaxBabe couldn’t smell it at all. Damn my overly-developed sense of smell. Every day, it got a little worse. I could tell it was coming from the pantry, but there was nothing in there that could possibly create this smell. I looked briefly inside the pantry and found nothing of note.

A week later, I came home from work and was hit by the Foul Stench of Death. Oh, dear Og. It was at that point I KNEW I had to do something about that awful smell.

I opened the pantry and the smell doubled in intensity. I started gagging. The MaxMutts started running around, trying to poke their noses into the pantry. I threw them out of the house and set about finding the cause of this olfactory misery.

I pulled out the tub of dog kibble. Nothing. I pulled out all the doggie treats. Nothing. All that was left was the plastic bag full of old dog leads, collars, 10-year-old vaccine certificates etc (hey, it’s my system and it works for me!).

I put on some rubber gloves, already knowing what I would find. I pulled the bag towards me. On top of it was a mouse trap. With a very dead mouse in it.

How dead was that mouse, I hear you ask? Well, when I say it was dead, I mean that the mouse body’s original owner had long expired. However, the mouse body’s subsequent owners, an enormous family of maggots, were quite alive.

The mouse’s fur was moving from the inside. Its skin was practically pulsating. I started retching. Oh Og, the horror. Despite starting to toss my cookies, I grabbed a plastic bag and threw the mouse, trap, and maggoty inhabitants straight into the wheelie bin.

I spent the next hour scrubbing the pantry clean with disinfectant and cleaning agents.

MaxBabe came home I told her my tale of woe. She just laughed, the bitch! As it turns out, MaxBabe’s sister had laid a trap in the pantry and just plain forgotten about it. We didn’t even know that trap was in there! It was a nice little surprise indeed! Makes me wanna barf just thinking about it.

Max.

[H3Knuckles]

You all are gonna hate me for this…

Read the “FemDefense” thread in this very forum
( http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=311831 ), I’m sure that’s something some woman might forget (I mean, if they leave it in often they might get used to it) and get (well, give, really) an unpleasant surprise later.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

@Guinastasia

Bosda, HOW do you not notice something on the kitchen counter like that-did you guys go on vacation?

Our kitchen counter was crowded with books & papers, as it always is.

We cannot confine our library to the bookshelves; it flows like a living river into every corner of the house.

The bag was under several magazines.

[Amazon_Floozy_Goddess]

Maggots are definitely my weak point when it comes to finding rotten stuff. I can usually handle it pretty well, as long as larvae aren’t involved.

It’s even worse if you find something covered in alien bugs that you’ve never seen in your life. That’s typically the point where I scream.

[zagloba]

Yeah, maggots really bother me as an adult.

But when I was about 12, I found about a half pint of maggots crawling around behind our garbage cans. I put them in a 3 lb coffee can, covered them with used motor oil, and set them on fire. Sounded a little like popcorn. Some of them went shooting out of open top of the can. Disgusting, I’ll admit, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

[Sunspace]

Last weekend while spring-cleaning we moved my dresser and I found an expired mouse in a clot of dust that had been in the unreachable space underneath.

twitch

Well, that explains the smell the previous Tuesday…

[Mama_Zappa]

No maggots, and not really something we forgot but…

A few years back, we had some contractors in to finish a small room in our basement.

They needed a place to plug in their electric tools. No plug in that room yet so they ran an extension cord into the furnace room. The only outlet there was in use by two other things, so they unplugged one of 'em. Never plugged it back in.

This went undiscovered for most of a week until I went down into the basement to get something out of the freezer. Which was full of meat - now inedible. And the d*mn contractor never took responsibility for it.

[whiterabbit]

The setting: a nice house with a back porch, near New Orleans, in the summer, where a spare freezer is located. Among the other things kept in said freezer are some frozen dinners. Nobody notices, but one day, one of the dinners falls out or something and ends up going unnoticed for about a week.

Until one of the dogs finds it. After it’s been sitting outside, rotting in swampish heat and humidity. I’m sure there were maggots involved. Rusty, being the idiot he is, thinks he’s hit a culinary goldmine and starts eating happily.

I don’t remember if he got interrupted or not, since I wasn’t there, but one way or another he ends up going upstairs, and even a dog’s stomach can’t handle this stuff, so he pukes on the carpet. He couldn’t have stayed downstairs or even outside and puked there…no, that wouldn’t have been anywhere near gross enough.

I’m told the stench was indescribable. I’m just glad I wasn’t there. :eek: