That is such a wonderfully succinct description, I’m stealing it for future retellings!
I’m not sure what the absolute worst thing I’ve ever smelled is, but I can tell you the most recent awful thing. I had a can of paste wax (Meguiar’s or Mother’s or something like that) that was probably between 5 and 15 years old. I opened it and it had dried out and the application sponge had mostly turned to dust. But the smell that came out of the can had the most pungent odor, it was very powerful and lingered for days. I don’t even know what to compare it to, maybe alum x 100. No idea what ingredient(s) in car wax made that smell.
I worked in Vegas (mid-summer, of course) with a guy from a “different culture”, where daily bathing and changing cloths was not part of it. Nice guy, but he didn’t shower or change for weeks!
His funk went well beyond a BO stink, to more of a “presence”. A dark, evil presence. You could feel him coming near, and your eyes would hurt and you couldn’t breath or swallow.
I’ve given “Viking Funerals” to dead, bloated livestock, and that was perfume next to this guy. And he wasn’t even dead!
Really, really bad. He was staying with one of the “bosses”, a real asshole, and I kind of had a bit of schadenfreude with that arrangement.
Thanks!
I have to say that my 1.5 year old son’s diarrhea diaper the other morning has to be in the running. I’ve smelled a lot of funky smells in my day, but that’s the first one in a long time that made me literally gag.
I remember those. That’s my input into this thread.
I’d hate to be the person that happened to, unconscious or not.
I’ve always heard that nurses, doctors, etc. don’t mind vomit or diarrhea that much because they have some general idea what that’s going to smell like. Abscesses are another story, especially peri-rectal abscesses which can accumulate a liter or more of pus before the victim has any symptoms. :eek:
[quote=“Malthus, post:32, topic:737762”]
Reminds me of this awesome video of - let’s just say not well thought out dead whale disposal. 
I was going to post that myself.
Dave Barry has said that in the early days of the Internet, he wrote a column about it, and someone who didn’t know he wrote it, and didn’t know about copyright laws, put it online. As a result, he had received a number of requests to write a column about it.
:smack:
That thing definitely gave off smell rays, didn’t it? 
That’s Amore!
Yes. Thanks to modern medicine.
One that stands out was a “toilet” we stopped at on the way to the Bandiagara Escarpment in the Dogon area of Mali. We were driving cross-country in a 4-wheel drive safari to get there, and the guide stopped at a small mud building in the middle of nowhere for a bathroom break. You could smell it from some distance away. Being gentlemen all, the men told the women to go first. The first contestant only made it to just inside the doorway, and fled immediately, gagging and retching. Succeeding supplicants didn’t fare much better, although a couple were able to hold their breath long enough to do business.
The men didn’t do much better. I hyper-oxygenated, ran in, and almost got done before I ran out of air. I started letting it out as I headed for the exit, but had to take a breath just as I hit the doorway. Holy fucking god, it smelled like Satan’s asshole, and I nearly vomited. The stench clung to our clothing for miles.
There’s a smell in my bathroom I think it’s the smell of stale dust on the window blinds and gets wet every morning when i shower and when the Sun hits the room the whole place smells terrible. Its not like the smell of death what you find it really palace however I have to smoke all the time and it is really making me angry.
Winner of the “Smell? What smell?” politeness category: A man and his truly devoted daughter would sometimes come into the office to chat. The man had had cancer surgery and had the hole-in-the-throat thing going on. There was a sicky sweet gagacious smell clinging to both of them. Every time the man exhaled I expected to see green slime spewing forth. Nice people, sad for the man, but oh the smell.
Winner of the “Combined Special Effects” category: There was this long-haired goat with a problem. Very smelly problem. The hair from front to back legs and halfway up each side was black, wet, and vile. As I started to trim the hair, the smell increased. Another bit of trimming and … maggots. Millions of them. Everywhere. I could hear them sliding over each other. I couldn’t even see skin. Nothing to do but trim and scrape and gag. The goat lived. I didn’t eat pasta for a long time.
Mid-July ,2005, driving across the state from helping then gf’s sister move for college. Nice sunny day, temps in the upper 90s low 100s. Windows up, ac on, I start to smell, real vague, very very faint, almost on a subconscious level, “The Smell”. Now, I will concede that my “The Smell” isn’t nearly as bad as a couple of others related here, but, it was Bad. Anyway, we drove along for about half an hour, and The Smell grew steadily stronger. By this time I knew roughly what I was smelling, having dealt with this smell before, dead critter, very dead critter of just the right vintage to have this particular bouquet. Another half an hour passes and the The Smell has grown in size and strength and morphed from The Smell into The Stench. By this time the gf and I are looking at each other and asking when and who hit the animal we have obviously been dragging in the spare tire rack under the pickup bed all day. Just as the fight starts to get heated, I spot it, a mere speck on the horizon at this point. I knew. I knew as surely as a person can know anything, what The Stench was. I floored the gas pedal, mileage, speeding tickets, arrests for reckless driving BE DAMNED!! It took me 20 minutes at 95mph to catch up to and pass the truck, and another 30 to get far enough ahead to get out of the bow-wave of The Stench. It was a tractor-trailer with an open top bin trailer hauling dead livestock and it was full enough to see hooves and legs sticking out of the top. In the approximate 2 mile stretch before and behind the big rig (the Zone of Exclusion?) I could barely see for the tears of distress running down my face. . I remember The Stench beating against the glass of the windows and the seals of the air vents, trying to force itself into the cab in full. I remember the nasal assault by wave upon wave of Stench Light Troops wily enough to sneak past the weather stripping and seals of the cab to attack us. I remember feeling that perhaps The Stench had changed, evolved, taken on new life, foul and unholy and became The Malodorous Presence. I may have been hallucinating by this time, not once did we open a window or a vent of any kind to let outside air into the cab of the our truck but I swear I heard a voice in my head commanding me to obey my master and open a window. The gf said something in a hysterical tone, I think about going faster and I snarled at her, threatened to open her door and shove her out at speed if she didn’t shut up and let me concentrate on getting us away from the Zone of Exclusion alive. It’s all kind of foggy now, except The Stench. 53 feet by 8 feet by 9 feet of Stench generating dead livestock, most of which probably died from some stench generating disease to begin with. In July. I hope they paid the driver of that truck enough money to buy some love cause at that level of Stench Intensity, how do you NOT get it into your skin, and how do you get rid of it? No way he had many friends willing to drink beers and shoot the shit on a weekend. Not with the Stench permeating his very being. . Yeah, the few details I remember from that day have softened with age, except the memory of that Foul Odor. Please excuse me, I have to go brush my teeth and use some Listerine because I threw up a little from the memory while typing
What are you trying to say with your second sentence? 
As a vet tech, my top two contenders are:
- Rotting oral melanoma in a teenage small breed dog. I walked into the exam room to clean it after the client and patient left and almost vomited into the trash can.
- Client’s wife’s brother died, leaving behind a horribly neglected dog that they are DETERMINED to save. The right rear leg is a bumpy mess of open, weeping, infected abscesses / skin infection from the proxmial femur to the tarsus. They really want to get her well enough to amputate, so we have done radiographs (no bony involvement on the leg, no evidence of chest mets) and bloodwork (absolutely not a surgical candidate!). And lots and lots of antibiotics. Every 2 weeks he comes back in with the dog for a recheck and more bloodwork. The whole clinic smells for an hour after he’s gone.
That’s called a tracheotomy. If you want to teach your kids why it’s not good to smoke, take them to visit a tracheotomy patient. They’ll get the message :eek:
[quote=“Malthus, post:32, topic:737762”]
Reminds me of this awesome video of - let’s just say not well thought out dead whale disposal. 
At least nobody was very close to it when it exploded. not so for this guy.
Oh, that is awesomely gross. :eek:
People always feel sorry for me when they find out I have no sense of smell. I think I’m just lucky.
Looks like there is a nice job in whale disposal available for someone with that attribute … 