I feel like I have to tell someone else about the job I did today. I live by myself and the only people who know the extent of this job are the two people I did the job with.
I have off this week b/c I start my new job (wooohooo!!!) next Monday. So my friend calls me and says she and her husband are doing a construction job right near my apt (they live about an hour away from me) and would I like to help, I would get paid 13$ an hour under the table for it, I could leave whenever I wanted to, etc… So I say yes, I’ll do, its 5 min from my apt and I don’t have anything else to do.
When I got there, I couldn’t believe what I got myself into.
Our job was to clean out this abandoned, fire gutted (well not gutted, but there were two small fires in this restaurant) chinese buffet restaurant b/c someone was supposed to come and look at it tomorrow and decide if they want to rent it and remodel it.
I think the Chinese people who owned the restaurant left in the middle of the fire and never came back. Has anyone ever smelled rotten eggs, fish, crablegs and oysters mixed with soot and old smoke from a previous fire all at the same time??? I have. Let me tell you, I have never in my entire life ever smelled anything as bad as this. There was tons of food left in the walk in refrigerator and kitchen of this place. (I think the fire was about a month or so ago). Luckily, my friends husband could stomach this nasty job. Maggots everywhere. Dead flies by the truckload. Me and my friend shoveled probably 500 pounds of broken glass today, since every window was broken out by vandals (their evidence, a bowling ball and a heavy piece of wood, lay on the blackened carpeted floor on the inside).Five hours later, we were finished, came back to my apt, had some beers and talked about how disgusting this was. Then my friend gave me 80 bucks for helping
I guess my question to you all is, what is the nastiest, foulest smell you’ve ever smelled and what were the circumstances you smelled it? Obviously, this is my vote. It even beats month old sour milk.
I worked for Greyhound in college. They have a a package delivery service sorta like FedEx except the stuff is dropped off at terminals along the way. Great if you need to get something into the middle of nowhere that day.
Three products were regularly shipped this way: bull semen, blood, and worms. The semen was in tanks full of liquid nitrogen (which could spill and looked real cool, especially to people high on diesel fumes, or just high) so it would keep. The quantity per shipment was low, so it wouldn’t rot up too nasty.
The blood and worms were a different story. If either got misplaced for too long they would create the worst smell I have ever found.
Sounds like your job today wasn’t really worth $13/hr after all.
Well, it turns out I got paid 16$ under the table/hour, which is more than she originally promised. I thought 80 for the day was pretty fair. I will never do that again, I can tell you that.
In college I had a summer job working for my hometown Dept of Parks. One of the joyous things I got to do, being the “new guy” was drive around on Mondays and Fridays to all the parks to pick up the trash and take it to the dump.
Picture July in Nebraska and people catching fish and tossing them into the garbage can on a Friday afternoon to sit and rot and boil and stink for an entire weekend just to greet me on a Monday morning.
In the hospital where I work, we had a man come in to the ER one night who apparently had gangrene or something in a wound on his leg. The entire ER and surrounding areas smelled like rotting flesh. People with pneumonia and upper respiratory infections were going outside to stand in the snow to get away from the smell. Nurses were retching all over the place. Everyone was spraying every kind of disinfectant and air freshener we could find but it was several hours before our eyes stopped tearing up with every breath. That is the worst thing I have ever smelled.
One time a tupperware container full of raw hamburger got put into the cabinet instead of the fridge by mistake (pretty sure it was a visitor). We didn’t notice for a couple of months, and even moved the container around in the cabinet a couple times without opening it (it looked like a similar container that was full of hard candies). When I finally did check it out, it was as bad as you’d imagine.
We had a big fish kill in our pond last year and lost all of our wonderful fish - major and very upsetting in itself, as they were more like pets than game. And since that alone wasn’t bad enough, the fallout was that someone had to wade out with a rake and bring all the bodies (hundreds of them, up to three feet long) in to shore and then get them into containers for disposal, and this was after said corpses had spent a few days in the sun. I offered to help, but SO bravely and nobly volunteered to handle it alone. (Knocked off some major purgatory time there, he did.) It was too revolting to go into in detail, but smelled very bad indeed, with the visuals to go with it.
Once, when I was in the FBI, we had to do an autopsy on a body that had been floating down the river for three days. When I looked in the mouth… Wait, that wasn’t me. Nevermind.
But seriously, I have been in on a few post-mortems, and they’re quite smelly. Also, the smell of burning bone from drilling and that cement they use when doing hip replacements is skankerific!
My wife would probably go with the floaters. In “Silence of the Lambs” they used a dab of Vicks under each nostril. She used this roll-on perfume from Avon. Horrible perfume, but it would kill her smell cells.
We were watching an exhumation of a person who had been buried in tundra for a long time (one of Franklin’s men, I think). All my wife could say was, “They can’t photograph the smell.” I prefer my corpses to be fully rotted down, myself.
Back in my delinquent days, a friend of mine chose to exact revenge on the neighborhood villian by egging his house. After “curing” the eggs for a week or so behind my buddy’s house, we piled into his car and made a late night run by the evil guy’s place. Unfortunately (or maybe Karmic’ly) before the first oval projectile was launched, the entire dozen eggs was unceremoniously dumped onto the floorboard of the backseat. The resulting smell was so bad that I and our other partner jumped out and walked home leaving Scott, the driver, to brave the fumes alone on his drive home. P-Yeewww!
I am a Ham and one of the big events we have every year is field day. We go out in the field and “rough it”. Our station was going to be located in the local wildlife federation building. It used to have electricity, but it hadn’t had it for at least a year before we set up there. In case you are interested we used generators for power. Anyhow when we were setting up in the building we noticed a freezer sitting in the corner. Everybody knew their was no power, but they kind of forgot. One poor soul(not me, thank god) got the brilliant idea of looking in the freezer to see if anything was there. He opened the lid and he slammed it down in a hurry. Unfortunately, we could still smell something. It turns out that someone had butchered a deer and it had sat in the sealed , unplugged freezer for a year. It most definitely was not mummified. God what a stink. As far as I know it’s still there two years later.
The runner up would have to be the inside of a rabbit breeding barn ::shudder::
Holding my nose:
Keith
The smell of my own flesh burning! I had to have my face reconstructed after an Incident, and it was a couple of days later so there was some dead flesh that could not be re-attached. It ended up being burned off right under my nose. I felt kind of sick.
and very upsetting in itself, as they were more like pets than game. And since that alone wasn’t bad enough, the fallout was that someone had to wade out with a rake and bring all the bodies (hundreds of them, up to three feet long) in to shore and then get them into containers for disposal, and this was after said corpses had spent a few days in the sun. I offered to help, but SO bravely and nobly volunteered to handle it alone. (Knocked off some major purgatory time there, he did.) It was too revolting to go into in detail, but smelled very bad indeed, with the visuals to go with it.