For me, it was a carton of wet cat food that ever-so-slightly split a seam within a 24-tin case. The case was packaged with a cardboard bottom and then plastic wrapped most-but-not-all of the way shut. This created the perfect environment for that one can to incubate, slowly spoil, and the slough out in between the other cans and on to the cardboard beneath, which in turn, became moist and began to mold. For several weeks, the other employees at the pet store and I would smell this odd…funk… emanating from somewhere deep within the cat food isle when we moved merchandise around, but there was never enough time to track it down and eliminate it. The smell grew.
Eventually, customers began to complain. This prompted a search after hours, of which I was one member of a three member team. We first isolated the odor to the Whiskas section, then began slicing open the cases with utility knives to sift through the individual tins within. With the plastic wrap removed, the smell went from more than enough to make you wrinkle your nose up in disgust palpable to unimaginably foul as a thin, oily, brown-black liquid seeped from the slit plastic and began to puddle on the linoleum.
Our manager, summoned by the retching sounds, came to investigate and began spraying the whole lot down with some sort of Tropical Mist pet deodorizer. As bad as several-week-old putrid wet cat food and mildewed cardboard can be, adding pineapple-mango overtones took things to a whole other level of un-stomach-able. I’ve long since quit the PetSmart racket, but on the few occasions when I find myself surrounded by a copious amount of wet cat food, I think back to that day, and shudder. And throw up in my mouth a little.
6-10 month old dead human in a sealed house. I won’t go into detail but me and another guy made $50 each (1975 dollars) for going in and sluffing it all into a couple bags. The morgue workers refused to go past the door.
A crazy old man came up to talk to me at the public pool one day. Something was dying in his mouth and the smell was a solid wall of force that hit me. He only spoke for a few minutes and I was polite enough but I couldn’t face him. That smell stayed in my nasal passages and throat for days and I am convinced that smelling it took a few years off my life.
When I worked in the Everglades, we’d set out traps to catch fish and crayfish. We would euthanize everything out in the field and preserve the specimens in formalin-filled urine cups, which was how we transported everything back to the lab for weighing and sorting.
Occasionally a snake would get into the traps. Because we were trying to document the total biomass of everything we caught, we’d have to take the snakes back to the lab too. But they were huge (relatively speaking) and obviously couldn’t be crammed into pee cups. So we’d stick them into freezer bags and pour a whole bunch of formalin in there to kill and preserve them. (Often the snakes were already dead, so at least we didn’t have to watch them squirm).
Well, inevitably we’d get back to the lab exhausted out of our minds. Especially if it was Friday. So inevitably we’d leave all the specimens in a cooler tucked in a corner somewhere and then leave for the weekend.
And when we’d return, the whole lab would smell like the worse smell you could ever imagine. Imagine what the pits of Hell would smell like. Now multiply that by a million. The moment we’d step into the lab on Monday morning, we would know immediately what was up. Those damn snake carcasses! The problem was two-fold. 1) There is not enough formalin in the world to preserve those fuckers properly. And 2) the Ziplock baggies would always leak since we were always reusing them, draining away all the preservative.
You could spray the lab with a million pounds of deodorizer, and it would somehow only make the foulness worse. The stank would set up shop in your nose and follow you the whole day long, even at home. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and smell it. It would make me gag.
But we never learned from our mistakes. We’d catch a snake, stick it into a baggie hoping maybe this time things would work out. But the same thing would happen. I think I lost several IQ points while I was in that particular job.
When I was maybe six I saw this really cool giant creamy puffball mushroom in the backyard. Being six years old and male I decided to kick it and it fell apart; slimy, putrid, and crawling with worms. Sort of a rotten flesh with pepper smell. I almost threw up.
I figured the Stench of Death would be a winner, but all I brought to the party was a dead pig on the bank of the creek. And my friend and I didn’t have to stuff it into a bag, either.
So… you really ought to tell us more about this gig. The OP specified “graphic detail”. How hard was this mess to carry? Do you mean the human had been dead that long? surely not that it was a baby…
Who in the world is going to click this thread and not want to hear more than what you were paid? Come on, make that glistening gasbag come to life for us!
Gangrenous bowel that exploded in my face during a laparotomy to remove the bad section. Ugh.
Attending surgeon squeezed all the contents of the bowel into the diseased area, expecting to excise it along with the dead bowel. But the damned bowel was necrotic so it burst. Right at me.
Edited: This is what happens when I don’t preview! QtM wins! Oh. Man.
Yeah, I can’t think of much worse than rotting meat smell (until QtM’s post). Whether it’s from a body, a freezer, or a can. Rotting fish meat, maybe a little worse even, since, you know, fish on top of the rot.
I’ve experienced the rotted canned cat food for sure. I’m not in retail but order a lot of food for the feline rescue I work for. I’ve had cans get compromised in shipping and learned the hard way to open all the boxes and check the flats of cans immediately. Ugh.
And then, being a vet tech, all sorts of dogs and cats in varying states of decay have passed under my nose. Including when our storage freezer fails. What is it that sticks in the nose like that??
A smell that’s interesting but not so nauseating is the smell of large amounts of fresh blood. The smell that emanates from a large dog’s abdominal cavity during invasive, exploratory type surgery. Something tells me people smell much the same. It’s a scent that only operating room people and maybe emergency department people know, the inner scent of a living body - different from not living.
Early '80s, I was delivering furniture; we took a bedroom set to a home. The wife was 800 lbs if she was an ounce, used two walkers–one for each arm–to get around, sat on three kitchen chairs in a semi-circle and made the most horrible croaking/choking sounds while breathing. It was obvious she could not use the facilities; trails of brown snaked all through the house. It was Stephen King bad–I expected the miasma to open its eyes and glare at me. It was all the sewage treatment plants in the world during High Summer. Take-a-deep-breath-before-you-go-in-the-house-and-try-to-hold-it-while-you-work bad. Run to get outside to get another breath. I felt sorry for the husband, who probably weighed 125 lbs soaking wet; he was very apologetic.
Got back to the store and got ranked out by the boss for leaving the BR set there. No good deed… .
I had a dog that rolled in a fish head that was really rip ! I had to drive home with her in my car and almost vomit in my car ! Thanks goodness I was close to home . My poor daughter had to sit in the back with the dog . My dog was very pleases with herself ! :smack:
A couple of us came across a single car mva many years ago. The car had caught fire a few minutes before we arrived and there were two people trapped inside. I think they were already dead, but we tried to get close to it, couldn’t as the fire was growing pretty fast.
All we could do was watch and then the repulsive smell started overtaking the other smells of the car burning. We looked at each other, realized what it was and quickly decided to retreat up wind.
Not at all pleasant, but some of the others posted here are no doubt just as bad.
My landlord once managed to spill the contents of his baby’s diaper pail down the front stairs. He wasn’t the best or most attentive of housekeepers, so it had had a long time to fester and ferment before he took it out. Several-day-old fermented baby poop is easily the worst (and most lingering) thing I’ve ever smelled. It beat the open-pit latrine we used at camp, hands down.
I think Qadgop and Kopek are tied (at least for the most gross-out smells, if not the worse).
Mine wasn’t quite as bad, but one year when I subsitute teaching some students got their hands on some butyl-something compound and spilled some of it in the school.
Imagine the smell if the entire student body upchucked in place and at the same time. Not pleasant. They had to clear the school.
Leachate. Which is a nice name for “the liquid that drains off the bottom of a landfill”. Wiki says “The smell is acidic and offensive and may be very pervasive because of hydrogen-, nitrogen- and sulfur-rich organic species such as mercaptans.” Let me tell you, that in no way captures the essence of that hell-brew. Mercaptans are just the fucking worst (e.g. skunk smells), but I’ve smelled those by themselves, they’re bad but not as bad as leachate.
So the geochemistry Masters students were presenting their theses to the department. Last guy comes in with a sealed jar, already there’s a nasty funk in the room. He talks for a bit, shows some slides of a landfill, then he opens the jar - and most of that small (50-seater) lecture theatre just about damn near passed out or else made straight for the door. In a wave from the front to the back. I was right at the back and could see it as it hit each row. Then it hit me, and I was running for the outside and spewing in the parking lot (next to one of my profs!)
I’ve never, ever seen a student get loudly, publicly crapped on by an HOD the way that guy was. No expletive spared. We couldn’t use that lecture theatre for a few days after that. Turns out he’d been working in the landfill and with the leachate in an on-site lab there for a year, become so acclimatized to it that he didn’t even register the offensiveness of the smell himself, poor guy.