I just found out where the “dead animal” smell in our backyard was coming from…
A raccoon had gotten itself stuck between the deck and the bottom of my riding lawnmower (when it was parked - I didn’t run over it). I have no idea how long it was there, but less than 4 weeks, since that’s when I last used the mower.
It was more maggot than raccoon when I found it.
Disgusting.
Once when in I was in USAF I was assisting the US Army in training elements of the Honduran Army & Air Force in joint operations.
We encountered the pit latrine of a particular semi-permanent encampment of the Honduran Army. This “camp” was a couple dozen plywood-floored tents and a small concrete-block office.
The latrine was a rough-hewn two-holer outhouse building shared by about *150 *people, many of whom had chronic diarrhea. Under US Army procedures, pit latrines are temporary. And are buried after adding some magic chemicals.
This pit was huge, overflowing, and hadn’t been disinfected or replaced in a decade. It looked to be 10 or 20 feet deep with rotting shit. In the tropics. The two-holer “building” was in danger of falling into the ever-widening pit of softening earth. And was totally infested with spiders.
That was bad enough, but then our Intel officer had to comment: “I have an idea … If we capture any bad guys we can wire their mouths open then lower them head first into the pit; they’ll talk for sure. I know I would!” Not a thought I’d have had without his prompting, but I had to admit he had a point.
Quite a discovery it was.
I had the exact same problem!
Except, it wasn’t under my lawnmower, it was under my bed.
…and, it wasn’t a raccoon…it was my ex-spouse…
I’m kidding! (She’s alive and well next door, lucky me).
Here’s a real one: a few months into cadaver lab (when the bodies are pretty much bits and pieces) I was walking between a couple tables on the way back to my cadaver when I slipped and fell on my keister. I looked on the bottom of my shoe to see what I slipped on. It was a nipple with surrounding areola and attached adipose.
…let me tell you, I didn’t feel like getting to second base with my girlfriend that evening.
I once ran the tongue saw at a slaughterhouse. My work station was between the two rendering rooms where the meat by products are cooked down into kind of a gruel than can be loaded onto a tank truck. One was the “edible” section which was the food grade sludge, and the other was the “inedible” section. Neither product was in any way, shape or form appetizing.
There was a pipe with an auger in it that moved the sludge from the cookers to the tank trucks in each.
One morning, the “inedible” department guy was really hung over. He crawled off into a corner to sleep it off while his cooker was running. The room I worked in was just a sliding door away from this sludge build up. At lunch time, we headed toward that door and slid it open.
A chest deep wall of hot and smelly inedible nastiness inundated us. The USDA guy shut the plant down while this was all cleaned up. We all hit the showers and got into clean gear to finish the shift.
After that, there has not been much that struck me as gross…
How’d y’all end up dealing with it? Soaking the shit with diesel and burning it off or what?
I’d have trouble eating meat after that. Yuck.
After our three weeks there were up, we left, having done nothing other than add our 10 guys’ contributions to the mass. Fixing that wasn’t in our job descriptions nor our mission statement.
The encampment may still be there for all I know. A quick Google is ambiguous. I bet theyvd moved the pit a time or two in the intervening decades. Or else it would have swallowed the whole camp. :eek:
“Valkyrie four, TACGuy three. Requesting Willy Pete against dug-in hostiles.”
Seriously though, they couldn’t spare the labor to dig another latrine and let the overflowing one lie fallow for a while?
You could say you had…
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a nip slip
What happened to hungover guy?
As for my own gross discoveries; Does finding my mother’s vibrator under the bathroom sink count? Or my father not deleting his autocomplete searches?
I had an example I was going to share but decided my minor experiences pale into insignificance compared to some of the professional level experiences related in this thread. I surrender.
When I was in rental property management, I once used a snake on a clogged toilet and found three dead newborn kittens.
I asked the tenant how she could do that. She said “I’ve taken bigger shits than that.”
We evicted her.
The hungover guy was found in the room where ha was sleeping it of and fired on the spot. A supervisor ended up doing that job because when it was posted no one wanted it. The supervisor was still at it when I left the job a few weeks later
When I was quite young I had two hamsters that I kept in a cage, named Hammy and Fuzzy. They were very cute, teddy bear like friends. I thought, three hamsters are better than two, so I talked my parents into getting me a third hamster, who I named Mr. Snickers, to frolic about with Hammy and Fuzzy. Three little teddy bears, I was in hog heaven!
They all seemed to get along with each other, becoming the pals I knew they would. I was their pal, too. We were one big happy teddy bear family that first day!
But, the next day, Mr. Snickers was climbing on the axel of the wheel Hammy was doing his exercise on (hamsters take aerobics very seriously you know) and managed to get his foot…kind of…mangled. It was still attached to his leg, but pointing in the wrong direction…and a bit floppy…and cyanotic. But, I figured Hammy and Fuzzball would take care of their new pal, and he’d be good as new in no time. Any creatures that look like little teddy bears must surely have kind hearts, right?
So, after dinner, I went to my room to check on good ol’ Mr. Snickers. He didn’t look in peak condition. In fact, his head was on one side of the cage and his body was on the other. He didn’t squeak like he used to when he saw me anymore and what remained of his body was a blood-stained skeleton and some dangling sinew. He didn’t look like a cute little teddy bear anymore and his long term prognosis appeared dire.
I never did accuse Hammy or Fuzzy of gnawing their new cage-mate to bone. It could very well have been some sneaky vicious non-teddy-bear-like predator who opened the cage, ate Mr. Snickers, and then closed the door on his way out. But, years later when it came time to get new rodent pets, I switched to gerbils.
A long time ago I was getting ready to go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving. I pulled my old winter coat out of the closet for the first time that year. As I was driving to the store on the way, I keep getting a slight whiff of something. At the store people were giving me weird looks. I walk in the door at Mom’s and she exclaims, “get that dead mouse off your shoulder!” It was sitting just out of my line of sight, and I’m sure now that people thought it was placed there as some sort of fashion statement.
You sure it wasn’t a hamster?
Tibby, are you a published author? You ought to be.
Being a third world army, they had unskilled labor out the wazoo. What they did *not *have was give-a-shit-about-troop-health-and-welfare.
Thanks for the reminder ref vibrators. This one didn’t happen to me, but to my wife and her cousins 20-ish years ago.
One of the grand-uncles in this huge extended family was widely assumed be gay, at least by the relatives of our generation (i.e. folks now 55-65, then teens). But this was back in the days when one simply didn’t talk of such things. And for sure his siblings, born around & before WWI, would never dream of thinking such thoughts, much less saying something.
He eventually died in his mid 80s, a lifetime bachelor without kids. So clearing out his house fell to his nieces & nephews. Most of the grunt work was done by the adult kids of the nieces & nephews, i.e. the folks of my wife’s generation.
At which time they found quite the stash of gay porn, penis pumps, bondage gear, etc. And lots of photos of him & his friends in various activities best not described to his surviving siblings or even his nieces & nephews.
He had always been sort of a prissy Felix Unger-like character and the reality of his alter-ego life as a major league libertine surprised and upset even the folks who thought they were accepting of his gayness & were sorry he’d been closeted all along.
My parents were sufficiently humdrum that we were spared any exciting discoveries like that when closing out their homes. Oh well.
Oh god I knew where that story was going. Hamsters are solitary creatures. I worked in a pet store many years ago and had to clean up the carnage that ensues when baby hamsters mature and get territorial.
One time a rat escaped and lived in the walls of our store. It would come out at night and rip the wings off the birds in the cages (budgies, lovebirds.) I don’t want to imagine the horror those poor birds went through.
Someday I will tell you guys about the apartment I cleaned out about 20 years ago. It had hoarders and the hydro had been cut off. There were some gross discoveries in that place, let me tell ya.
The grossest thing I discovered was along the lines of LSLGuy’s Honduran latrine story.
A few years back my husband and I took a Silk Road tour of western China (Xinjiang). Absolutely fabulous trip, hands down, especially the long bus journey along the northern rim of the Takla Makan Desert. The scenery was spectacular, but the bathroom aspects provided some moments of extra adventure. You see, that particular route (between cities) is frequented by long-haul truckers and not many other people, so the accommodations are…spartan.
Often times we’d just pull the bus over and spread out to find adequate trees/brush/etc. (men going one way, women another). This worked really well, most of the time – I had the most spectacular pee of my life in full view of the Tarim River at sunset, with the majestic Tien Shan mountains spread out behind.
Then, there was what our guide (an awesome anthropology professor of Uighur descent) advertised as “The World Famous Negative Five-Star Toilet” (with a glint in his eye). It was on a long and particularly boring stretch (between Aksu and Qiuci, IIRC) without many other options.
The bus pulled up to a building and we all piled out and went to our requisite sides…only to find that the building was:
The trench was filled with crap and TP, almost to the rim. The stench was unspeakable even in the dryness of the desert. (I think the lack of a roof was actually a mercy.)
We took one look and retreated back outside. Since there were few other options, most of us officially discarded the last of our fucks about privacy and ended up behind knee-high ephedra bushes, which were pretty much the only cover. (I’m sure I mooned at least three truckers despite my best efforts.)
Years ago I read about some poor old fellow in England who was skeletonized by hundreds (maybe thousands) of hamsters that somehow infested his house. Hamsters were everywhere, even pouring out of holes the walls when the authorities arrived. It was carnage on a grand scale.
I don’t remember whether I read this in the New York Times, or the National Enquirer—but, it was a reputable source.
Ok, here’s another one: Two of my classmates decided to smuggle out the head of their cadaver to their rental home for the weekend (supposedly to study its anatomy for an upcoming gross anatomy test). That’s bad enough.
But, being Halloween weekend they decided to take it a step further and put the head on the sill of their entranceway window to scare the kiddies. They thought this was very funny.
By Tuesday they were both expelled from school and arrested. They probably didn’t think that was very funny.