Orange Skinner
You’re welcome.
Mine goes in a rather different direction. I was working later than usual one morning on some production run paperwork when Melanie (probably not her real name, I forget) came in to write up the delivery invoice forms based on my paperwork.
Melanie was a reasonably attractive woman in her early twenties who practiced appropriate hygiene. Who absolutely bathed herself in perfume. This stuff had a metallic, powdery quality to it that was not at all pleasant. Sitting in close proximity to her for more than half an hour, I ended up tasting that shit on my tongue, it was that dense. I am one of those people with serious sensitivity to chemical fragrances, to the extent that there are retail venues that I will refuse to enter. Breathing Melanie’s toilet water for as long as long as I had to resulted in me getting a very bad cold.
Ladies, just please knock it off.
When I had my braces removed from my teeth. All those hours of brushing and water picking did not keep a deep, vile, rotten smell from adhering to the inside of the braces that you couldn’t smell until they were lifted off the teeth. I kept gagging until the orthodontist finally got the last tooth free.
This.
Sometimes I’m sitting at a Subway eating my lunch and these old ladies come in after drenching themselves with perfume. They are several feet away, but the stench wafts its way over to my sandwich and I end up eating their perfume.
“Toilet water”, what an appropriate name!
This is a sad story. There is a gentleman who goes to the diner where I eat breakfast every Saturday. It’s one of those old-timey places with all the old-people regulars. Anyway, this man is in his 70’s and his girlfriend passed away a few years ago. Apparently he’s “gone downhill” since her death and he’s been on his own. He lives alone in an apartment up the street. The man stinks. Badly. He’s kind of crippled - has a hunched back, difficultly walking, and his hands are kind of curled up. His teeth are atrocious. He has a hernia of some sort and a “bag” - colostomy bag maybe? He always smells strongly like dirty laundry & stale urine mixed together. But he is a nice man and we have pleasant conversations, even though I have to sit a couple seats away from him and not breathe in too much.
Anyway he wasn’t there this weekend and I said it feels weird without “Jack” here, was he in earlier? Turns out that so many customers had complained about his smell that the owner of the diner had to write him a note last weekend asking him to not come in anymore until he gets cleaned up. (I’m assuming that’s what the note said, I didn’t ask.) Apparently they haven’t seen him since. Heartbreaking.
Deadly smell: We treated the nice moving guys to doughnuts and chocolate milk. One guy set the gallon jug of milk inside our cleaned-out fridge to drink later; in the meantime other moving guy came along, strapped the fridge shut, and loaded it onto the Mayflower truck.
The truck left San Diego on July 1 and arrived in Ohio on July 7; this week was one of the hottest on record in the U.S. and the choco milk sealed in the fridge didn’t fare well. At all.
The moving company’s insurance rep argued that we didn’t need a new fridge, just their professional “clean-up-disaster-area” cleaners. He sent out the cleaners, they opened the fridge, slammed the fridge shut, and called the rep to issue a gift certificate to Home Depot for a new one.
Smell number two is bush league at best, but: in 1987 I came down with a terrible flu/cough virus and chugged some NyQuil whilst standing at the kitchen sink. It came right back up onto the dishes in the sink, the dishes in the drainer, and into the open kitchen utensil drawer. I can’t bear to be in the general vicinity of someone taking cough/cold medicine now, much less smell it myself. It makes me feel barfy just to write this out.
Number three, current smell: last week we switched Big Dawg over to Blue brand chow – it’s supposed to be made of “all natural” organic ingredients that make doggies really healthy. BD may be feeling healthy, but we are living in a continual, noxious green cloud of dog fart – this stuff must be made of groundhog guts, cabbage, and chili.
So I’m not saying sewage treatment plants smell nice, or anything, but really they’re not that bad. Worse than cow barns, but generally bearable, even for long periods of time.
On the other hand, there are garbage-burning/material recovery plants, where they chop up all the garbage, and send it on conveyer belts all over the place (so magnets can pull out metal and so forth), which basically results in spewing a combination of aerosolized to discernible chunks of garbage over every surface in the large building. Bear in mind, this is not a high-margin operation, so there’s no budget for daily cleaning of all the surfaces; with some of the surfaces being I-beams forty feet above the floor, I’m not sure there’s even budget for annual cleaning… Now consider going in there in the height of summer.
More AAA than big leagues, as far as smells go, but still had its own charm.
And not one I experienced, but I met some of the folks who cleaned out refrigerators from houses abandoned after Katrina. You know, the refrigerators that had been anaerobically sealed for weeks/months in bayou heat. Word was that Mike Rowe got invited to come participate, but decided there was in fact a job too dirty, and declined…
OP should have phrased the question “worst smell aside from death”. Mine would be severely burnt cookware, because it lingers in the house and nostrils for days.
One summer job I spent rehabbing old rental houses for some slum lord. In one house the people couldn’t afford to pay their water /sewer bill so they pooped into 5 gallon buckets. I had to carry 7 of them up to a dumpster and throw them in. When the surface crust broke it was ungodly.
For my current job I was testing the effluent from the Huntington waste water treatment plant. As Quercus said, they aren’t really bad, just unpleasant. Well at this one they must have had a system upset. I walked in the front office door and had to go up a flight of stairs to get to the receptionist. I took my first breath partway up the stairs and it made me gag. So much so that I couldn’t get any oxygen in. Everytime I tried to breath in my throat closed up. After a second of panic I ran up the stairs and through the doors at the top into the actual offices. The receptionist had a couple of candles lit which worked well enough to let me breath again.
One weekend we noticed that there seemed to be a lot of mice around the cottage. I found a bucket trap* under the cottage and not having any antifreeze I substituted plain lake water. We were going to be back in 3 or 4 days so how bad could it get, right?
Unfortunately, there was a heat wave that week. 
Wow! We could smell something was not right as soon as we pulled up to the dock. At the cottage the stench was unbearable. The bucket was full up to the waterline with dead, bloated, and stewed mice!
After a lot of gagging and and dry-heaving I got the bucket out but we had to air out the cottage all weekend and couldn’t sleep in in the first night.
Even worse, there were still mice around! Although, I suppose the ones that fell in later would have been able to climb out over the corpses.
- basically a bucket with wooden ramp up to a piece of doweling across the top, and a hourglass-like bait station. The mice can climb up and walk across to the bait but will cause it to roll over dumping them into the bucket. Mine was store-bought but homebrews are simple.
One to add to my list tonight. Huge Rottweiler, dead long enough to be past rigor. Had soiled herself and then laid in it the whole time until she was found, plus we suspect she had pyometra, so the smell of rotten infection on top of everything else. The owner’s neighbor had wrapped the dog in a tarp, filth and all, and put her in the trunk of the owner’s car. Three of us, all experienced techs, agreed this was one of the worst any of us has dealt with. One of us had to run out to the hall twice to retch while we were bagging the poor thing (tarp and all - no way in hell we were going to try and unwrap that) . Way to end the night! I have to take a shower now, and showering before bed is not my norm. I can still smell it.
Roadkill on a hot summer day. My friend and I were walking down to the BP by my house to get some snacks. (God, this was like, 20 years ago!) And then we saw this…thing. It was all mangled up and crawling with maggots. My god, the stench was like the vapors from Satan’s asshole. It was really hot and muggy out, and the reek just sort of hung in the air.
The others would have to be kitten poop (for some reason it’s worse than older cat poop) and when you puke, and it comes out your nose. You can at least gargle and get the taste out of your mouth, but in your nose, it’s almost impossible.