Yeah, me too, twice. The most recent time was this summer at a family holiday village in southern France. The resort served andouillette to everyone one night, without any warning or explanation. After making an initial incision and watching the intestines and stench pour out (really, like that exploding whale), and hearing my girls start to gag, I discreetly picked up the plate and walked, with some shame, to the opposite corner of the very full dining hall.
Where I found a table covered with plates of barely-eaten andouillette!
Patchouli. The answer will always and forever be patchouli.
Although…I’ve been in relationships with a few women who could drop some serious ass. I thought you were all delicate flowers!? One woman in particular (who was just a tiny little thing!) once clogged a toilet and I COULD NOT plunge it because I was gagging and choking so violently. It was unreal. I’ve been around (and in!) sewage and dead things and all sorts of horrible stuff, but apparently girlpoop is my kryptonite.
A friend of mine had an ulcer in his stomach start bleeding, and he was puking and shitting blood.
A trip to the hospital and he ended up having half of his stomach removed. Surgery went well and he his happily sitting in the living room now, farting up a storm.
Because he couldn’t have anything but ice chips for a week or so, it was a while before he had to poop when he was in the hospital. When he finally felt the need to go, since he was allowed to move on his own, I helped him to the bathroom so he could poop.
The only thing that had been running through his gut this whole time was blood. When this old digested blood finally made its way out of his system, it was the foulest thing I have ever run across, even now, thirty-five years later.
It was beyond foul. It instantly made me gag, caused my throat to close up to where I could barely breathe, and its rancidness stuck to the inside of my sinus cavity for hours.
A few years ago I did a survey of a chicken processing plant. We had to measure up all the machinery outside to an unusual level of detail. So I ended up having to set up the theodolite and spend 45 minutes standing right next to the blood pit, a pit the size of a large spa pool that had a constant stream of hot, steamy diluted blood gushing out of pipes from the killing floor.
After five minutes, I felt faint and staggered, and realized I’d stopped breathing out my nose in an attempt to block out the smell, so I spent the rest of the time breathing out my mouth. The bin of chicken feet and gizzards nearby and the truckloads of nervous battery chickens shitting everywhere didn’t help either. It’s a nasty smell, not particularly shitty, but a weird combination of sweet and nasty, and very acrid.
I never got used to it, and it seems to get worse the longer you’re exposed to it, so every time we visted the place, by the end of the day we were absolutely gagging to get out of it. Luckily, I wasn’t having chicken that night.
Missed the edit limit - Here’s another one - Had to do a site plan of a petrol station near a busy city centre. There was a Denny’s (Auckland’s only) next door, and the whole day we were tantalized by the smell of deep frying. Come the late afternoon, we’re tired and ready to go home, and the last thing we need to do is lift all the manhole covers and measure the depths of them. We do all the ones by the petrol station and move on to a bunch of them in the Denny’s carpark that aren’t marked on our plans for some reason. We pull the last one and the frying smell burst out at us tenfold. The whole day, we’d been smelling the fat traps of the restaurant, and suddenly we feel a lot less hungry!
Mmmm, yeessssss:( I’ve been in a near identical situation to this. You’re right, digested blood is…beyond foul works, yes, murderously beyond foul I think is better.
I wonder what is worse, intensity or duration. A brief moment of smell so intense it causes tears or something less bad but with a longer exposure
Have you ever tried to scrub a smoker? There is a tar like residue everywhere. And mine just happened to be infused with doggy wee-wee.
A power washer wouldn’t do it. And even if it did the smoker’s reputation would mean that nobody (possibly still including the original dog Bubba) would touch a bite of food prepared in it. There are some situations that just aren’t salvageable.
I was hired to clean up a crazy cat lady’s house after she passed. Apparently, she would take them in and never let them out again.
The smell was so bad that you couldn’t walk by the front porch. We had to wear suits and respirators to go inside.
There were cats everywhere… alive, dead and everything in between and beyond.
There were bowls of dried-up food, milk, etc. on almost every horizontal surface. There was feces and urine stains all over the floors/carpets.
There were doors to rooms that she had left closed for months…maybe years. Every piece of furniture had dead cats behind, beneath and even inside!
I still gag even thinking about it or if I catch a whiff of a dead animal… even as small as a mouse.
I was going to say this - my mom ran a meat chicken business and her freezers failed over the weekend in a particularly hot summer. When she got there on Monday it was so disgusting I had trouble entering the place to help.
My dog got loose once, and we lived near a creek where Salmon run. We drove up and down the road trying to find him, and a few hour later found him just outside the park the creek runs through. As soon as he hopped into the car, the smell hit us like a ton of bricks. Rotting fish mixed with wet dog and excrement. It was a bad idea to let him in the car - I couldn’t get the smell out for a long time. When we got back to the house I immediately led him to the bathroom and gave him two thorough baths. It slightly lessened the smell - but not by much. We went into the livingroom, when suddenly he began vomiting. It was pink and thick, and he couldn’t stop throwing up. The smell was 10x worse than what it originally had been.
I took him to the vet. He must have rolled in his own feces, and eaten rotting salmon. He was fine, just needed a few days of rest. My boyfriend had to tear up the livingroom carpet and even with days of scrubbing we couldn’t get the smell out of the wood floor, so we re-sealed it and carpeted over it.
I cannot accurately describe how awful the smell was.
guestchaz, I just want to say that I love the phrase “Zone of Exclusion.” I will probably be using it a great deal once the gas starts getting passed this Thursday when I visit the fam for Thanksgiving. Thanks in advance.
Durian. That so-called food stinks worse than corpse flowers. Sadly, a rather large number (note: any number larger than one is too large a number in this case) of people in China, even here in Beijing, think durian is a wonderful fruit. This leads not only to the thing being sold in many stores, but also to “durian debris” on the streets and sidewalks around town.
Do you, perhaps, remember the very first time you had the questionable pleasure of changing a baby’s crap-filled diaper? The durian stench is off the scale in comparison. If someone is consuming a durian in the same room, nay, same building as the one in which you are changing such a diaper, you are best advised to leave that diaper spread out on a counter as a potpourri (rather ironic, given the history of that word). If you step on some piece of durian on the street and your only options are (a) continue to walk with that demonic debris on your foot, or (b) bathe in an open and filled septic tank, the correct choice is (b).
Definitely not the same as andouille, which I love.
Has anyone mentioned durian in this thread? There’s an Oriental market (it’s what they call themselves) in town that sells them, albeit in the deep freeze. They still smell like dirty sweat socks.
ETA: Never mind; I should have scrolled to the bottom!
Hadn’t seen this particular old girlfriend for years. She had heard I was back in town so she called to see if we could have lunch.
I went over to her place and it was wonderful to see her face again. I then gave her a hug and was immediately hit with the most GOD AWFUL smell I had even experienced. I’m sure glad she couldn’t see my face.
Only 2 or 3 feet away, I couldn’t smell anything, but there was no good-bye hug when I left.
The strange thing was that while I was there, she got a phone call during which she was thanking someone for the flowers they had sent. It sure seemed like it was a boyfriend she was talking to. How the hell could some guy not smell that odor? And have sex with her???
She was still very close to her sister who lived nearby. Wouldn’t her sister tell her about the odor?
This is probably nothing compared to some of the things I’ve read here, but this is the worst smell that I can recall experiencing – Several years ago, I mentioned how Japanese beetles were ruining our rose bushes. Over the next few days, it turned out that the kids had picked all of the beetles off the bushes. They put them in a plastic soda bottle and capped it. I learned of their project when my son brought the bottle to me and said it smelled weird. I took a whiff and puked.
I once visited a place in western New Jersey - Space Farms. It was probably the worst zoo in The US. From a hill, I was looking down at the lion display - just a concrete pad with an iron cage - when a male lion raised his tail and backed up against the bars. As two women looked on, he proceeded to hose them down like a tomcat marking his territory.
Someone had to ride in the car with them to get home…
Dispatched for ??? - a well-being check, I think. Get there & get in to find a very dehydrated elderly invalid woman who had been sitting in her own eliminations for days. The bedroom contained the body of her son/caretaker who had committed suicide some days earlier. We had to go back there to try to determine how long ago to get some better idea of the patient’s condition. I’m not sure which room smelled worse but I can tell you that Vick’s vaporub under the nose didn’t begin to cover it. This was not a situation where we could air out the house for a bit & then come back to deal with it.
We got her to the hospital alive, but sadly, she didn’t make it long there.
Our HS Biology teacher thought it would be a good idea for us to hatch/raise chicks & got buy in from administration; except there was some delay in building the chicken coop.
We had a cage/incubator in the back of the classroom, right next to my assigned seat. At first it was just a warm light on the eggs. Then they hatched - a couple dozen cute widdle yellow-fluffed baby chicks (enough for each & every student to have their own tagged chick to repeatedly weigh & measure & chart their growth). Who doesn’t love cute widdle yellow-fluffed baby chicks?
Did you know that cute widdle yellow-fluffed baby chicks shit? And that they grow & start to lose their cute widdle yellow-fluffiness…& continue to shit?
Guess where they stay when the chicken coop hasn’t yet been built? Yup, right there in the cage in the back of the classroom, less than an arms length from my assigned seat.
After a week or two you could smell the smell as soon as you turned into that hallway (& it was the last classroom on the left), even with the door closed. The air got thicker as you walked up the hall. By the time you opened the door, your eyes were watering. But sitting in my assigned seat, in the back of the classroom, less than an arms length from the cage containing weeks worth of not so cute feathered chickens shit for 50 minutes a day (140 on Tuesday’s lab day double period) was unbearable to say the least because it’s hard to listen to the teacher, let alone concentrate when all you’re doing is trying to invent a new way of breathing that doesn’t use your nose, because even when you mouth-breathe, your nose still gets a healthy olfactory whiff.
Despite the fact they finally got moved outside once the coop was built for them, it was the only year he ever did the chick thing.
It’s not as bad as many of the posts here, but once in Tokyo I had just got one of the infamous crowded trains and there happened to be a free seat. Tokyo etiquette insists that you rush to sit down as you will be standing for an hour if you don’t.
Within a second of sitting down, I saw or rather smelled why it was vacant. There was a homeless guy next who just reeked. I had to stop breathing and flee to the next car.
Another time was when I first encountered stinky tofu which my wife bought at a night market. I thought it was regular tofu, so I put a big piece in my mouth, only to have the smell hit me from inside.
It’s not really that bad, except that I wasn’t expecting it.
