A few minutes ago, all my supervisors and my secretary are running around here complaining of a nasty smell. They’ve deduced (Thank you Lt. Columbo) it’s either in the carpet or someone puked in the ladies room and there’s a nasty stench solmewhere.
They decide they must do a maintenance order to get the carpet shampooed and the ventilation checked. Sometimes dead critters find their way into the ventilation - we’re in a modular building.
Before we can spend maintenance money, I have to sign off, so I investigate (say it like I’m Elmer Fudd - In…phetehtigate!). Yup, there’s a stank out there. Bad one.
Imagine, in an olfactory sense - something that’s been dead for a week being scraped up off the road and burned. Then the burnt remaining bits are eaten by a Canadian Goose. Which dies from the stink of what it ate, and falls in a sewer. From whence it is salvaged and torn to bits by feral cats. Which then puke up the resulting, uh…puke and then that is gound repeatedly into my carpeting by old wet boots caked in canadian goose crap (singing The Circle of Life in the background).
I feel the stank more than smell it, and follow the retch around the corner to it’s source: A corck pot that someone left on so as to scald the remaining Cheese Soup con Root Vegetables.
Windows are open here, and we’re all recovering nicely, thank you.
Ah, Mr. Bus Guy , I’m afraid I can’t top that story.
The closest I can come is a mini-fridge full of food someone left over a long weekend when the power was being shut off for maintenence. In Florida…in the summertime… bleah.
Maybe we could start up a new reality-type game show, filmed in a dirrefent office each week: Name that Noxious Odor.
We once smelled a barfy rotten smell here in my quadrant of the office. At lunchtime, when everyone else was out, we circled and circled and investigated and eventually found the source.
A woman had put sundry leftover half-eaten cups of instant oatmeal in a closed drawer in her desk and left them there until they started to putrefy. Accompanying the cups were, for some reason, wadded up dirty pantyhose (I don’t even want to know why they were there). The woman’s secretary disposed of all the crap, and when the woman returned from lunch, she seemed miffed that her treasures had disappeared.
This woman has long since been fired for other bizarre behavior and general incompetence.
A tomato or potato rotting away on the car’s carpet under the seat will make you sick.
I left a couple pan fish in a bucket in the trunk after a end of year class picnic. I had forgoten about having any fish, because so much had happened that day. A week later when ma was driving the car to get groceries we had to pull over. I was in serious trouble with her, when the trunk was opened.
Here’s a smell that was gut wrenching. I moved to a new rental house and the owner had owned the whole chunk of land before houses and cabins were built. He got back a small house by default when the owner died in the hospital. I was with him, when he said he needed to stop at the place. The power had been off for 2 months. There was a large chest freezer he wanted to remove. It was full to the top with rotting meat, when opened. I didn’t wait for someone to tell me to run out the front door.
A friend of mine went to high school (no, really!) and his science teacher there kept some boll weevils. He fed them by feeding them little bits of skunk meat. Now, eventually the school went on break for a few weeks. Rather than come in every day to feed the boll weevils, the astute science teacher, in all his science wisdom, simply gave them an entire dead skunk, to buffet them through the 21 days. He locked the door to his classroom, and locked the larger doors to the science wing, and went on break. Three weeks elapsed, and he returned to reopen the place.
POW! Wall. Of. Stink. Imagine the entire contents of a skunk’s spray sac – and mind you they use only a fraction of its capacity when they spray – being released into a hallway, slowly filling its hundreds of square feet and high ceilings for days and days, until one day an unsuspecting science teacher who really ought to have known better nearly meets his end at the hand of a veritable army of molecules that have taken hold in the hallway’s atmosphere more firmly than East Village squatters.
Well. I was going to post about the mouse that died in our office over a holiday weekend, so it had an extra day to decompose, and we finally found it in the copy room, but after the dead skunk, nobody wants to hear about a puny little dead mouse.
Really, what was he thinking? A whole dead skunk. No, that’s not going to stink. After a few weeks, it’ll smell like Chanel No. 5. Okay, that’s a bad example, because Chanel No. 5 does smell a bit like rotting skunks, so replace that with your favorite perfume.
I was a lab worker for 12 years. I can’t remember how many times the fire alarm went off for “gas leaks” that were actually due to some idiot using 2-mercaptoethanol outside the fume hood. The Powers That Were sent around a memo about this, but it still happened.
The last lab I worked in did visual pigment research. Getting the pigments required dissecting a lot of cow eyeballs; we would freeze the remains of the eyeballs in plastic bags until the freezer was full, then make a trip to the incinerator. The freezer was pretty old, and there eventually came the Monday morning (of course it was a Monday) I walked into the lab and thought, “Nasty smell, is there a dead mouse or…Oh SHIT.”
The refrigerator fan had broken over the weekend; the compressor was still running but no cold air got into the freezer. It was actually warmer in the freezer compartment than in the room, and the eyeballs had been merrily rotting, and the bags leaking blood and fluid which also rotted, for God knows how much of the weekend.
Everything in the refrigerator compartment was still cold, but stank so badly the smell was transferred with the items to our other refrigerator, and we had to deodorize that as well. Oh, and you have one guess who got to clean out the freezer.
I really needed a good laugh today…