At a friend’s (we’ll call him Bob) 21st birthday party, one of the guests brought over a casserole. It was placed in the oven (not turned on) to be heated later and eaten for dinner. As large quantities of alcohol were consumed, dinner was forgotten.
Important items to note:
Bob and his apartment mate (Ted) don’t cook much beyond what can be heated on the stove or in a
microwave.
Bob’s birthday was in February
Over time, the apartment began to smell funny. Despite several searches of the apartment, the strange, intensifying odor could not be located.
Around May, the search turned to the oven.
This introduced a new dilemma. Yes, the source of the smell was identified, but how to dispose of it given that no one was willing to open the oven door again?
Around July, Bob finally figured out how to dispose of the monstrosity growing in his oven. He turned the oven to “Clean”, and Bob and Ted left for the afternoon.
In September, I visited again, and noticed the rather bad smell. Kind of like rotten food that was left on the bar-b-que too long. That was when I found out what had happened.
I don’t know what was worse, the fact that:
It took them three months to open the oven door
It took them 2 more months to figure out what to do once they did.
There’s the time I had the root canal. Drilling into living and/or dead tissue with a high speed drill makes for a serious stench. Almost made me forget the pain.
Then there’s coy jr’s scratch and sniff book, something by the “bugs in boxes” guy. It’s got this scratch and sniff “dirty sock” smell that is unbelievable. It makes me ill just to catch a whiff. My son thinks it’s hysterical. He puts his nose ON the paper and takes huge sniffs of air. He’s three, what can I say?
Myron, I came to this thread specifically to mention roadkill skunk. I haven’t smelled dead bodies or burnt flesh - I’m sure they’d be worse - but the worst thing I ever personally caught a whiff of was fresh roadkill skunk. A friend and I had the clever idea to throw it in a bag and drop it on the doorstep of someone we didn’t like but I quickly aborted that plan when I got within 10 feet of it and nearly puked my guts out.
From working in a veterinary office, where we used an electrically charged scalpel to immediately cauterize the wound that it left. Nothing like the smell of ozone mixed with burning dog flesh.
The worst smell on earth, is the stuff that comes out of a dogs butt when it’s either been licking itself or releases one of those wet farts. I was told by a vet that dogs have this, um, butt gland, that can release this “butt juice” when stimpulated by the dog licking themselves.
It’s rare, I’ve only smelled it a few times, but it’s horrible. If your dog ever gets up and you see a little brown spot, run like hell.
I am not sure which I-5 you are referring to, but I used to work in Vernon California about a mile from a rendering plant, and outside on our freight dock it smelled like something died twice on hot still days. On really bad days you could smell it from the I-5 freeway…:rolleyes:
well, I had the pleasure of doing a field audit for the local natural gas company. One of the places we visited was the “scent shed”. This contained a large tank of the agent that provides the odor for natural gas (mercaptan?). It literally knocked me backwards and I could not enter the shed.
Also bad was the morgue I had to check each night as a hospital security guard. Smelled like old death.
Last but certainly not least is the previously mentioned grease buckets behind fast food joints. I worked at KFC in HS, and the combo of old grease and rotting chicken fat/skin was hideous.
At the job I was at for a short time we had to empty the furniture and clean the basement of a house, where a man had died in an enclosed room, and stayed for a little over two weeks in the middle of the summer!!! The gas mask did NOTHING!!! Also we wore those suits that cover up your clothes, kind of like those X-Files or E.T guys that are in a contaminated area.
If I hadn’t have used my friends shower who also worked with me that day and gotten a ride from him, there would’ve probably been a few hundred people saying “This guy on the bus/subway smelled so bad that I puked!!!” or “I got on a subway and it smelled so bad that I vomited!!!” or the bus driver would have said “Get off this bus, you make me want to PUKE!!”. Boy did I smell bad, I almost…well you know.
Acute NUG, necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis, AKA trench mouth. Think road kill marinated in sewage then baked with onions. Basted with a lovely melange of skunk juice and diarrhea. In the mouth.
I admit it - At a distance I kinda like the stench of road-killed skunk :). Sorta citrusy.
I also like the smell of barns, as long as the ammonia reek isn’t too dominant.
I worked in a wastewater treatment plant for years - Almost nothing there bothered me. Septic sewage, the sickly-sweet smell of seconday sludge, various dewatered and digested wastes - No problems. Except for “grit”. Heavy particulate material screened out from the influent flow. For some reason shoveling that crap when a big grit hopper had a catatstrophic failure/spill, was about the only thing that ever made me want to heave.
For some reason I’m also very vulnerable to E. coli culture. Makes me nauseous every time.
My worst olfactory insult was helping an injured vulture at a wildlife shelter. Vultures are magnificent soaring birds in the air, but on the ground they are rather ungainly and helpless. They resort to a primitive defense; vomiting and defecating. And ya know what they eat. It’s the most head-reeling gag of a smell I’ve ever inhaled. Decomposing flesh compounded by digestive juices. The puke of all pukes. The thing was, I couldn’t run away; had to help the poor bird.
Coming in second: working for a friend’s upscale catering biz, and making a beef stock. The large leg bones came pre-sliced and frozen, and were thawed, roasted a bit, and then put in huge pots to make stock. When I took the roasted bones out of the oven, I 'bout passed out. It smelled way beyond dead. I thought maybe it was a bad batch, but was told that was the norm. The thought that people were going to eat the result was stomach-curdling.
To echo Kewk’s post; my Dad is a marine biologist, and did a lot of work with sharks. Our 70’s station wagon hauled a lot of dead sharks, and built up quite a nice nasal patina over the years. Oddly, when I smell dead fish and formaldehyde, it conjures up a nostalgic memory of childhood.
Gotta say that Veb’s post takes the most ghastly gagging award here among many strong contenders. Jeez, Veb, Ive always admired ya, but the notching knife is working away here.
My feet sweat so much that the odor even begins to irritate me, and once when I took my shoes off at work a co-worker fled the room in disgust. (This was a guy who’d been in the Vietnam War and who had probably smelled all kinds of horrible things.)
This thread reminds me of a bizarre tale of my childhood. I had a pet hamster and it died. My dad and I took it out to the yard to give it a decent burial and I saw its leg twitch. “Dad, it moved!” I yelled.
“No,” my dad explained, “that’s just a reflex.” He kept digging.
I stared at my dead hamster. It’s leg twitched another time. “Dad! It moved again!”
“No,” he explained, “sometimes the muscles twitch after–hey, it is moving!”
So we took the hamster back indoors where we alerted my mom to the situation. She decided that since it was winter the hamster was probably hibernating. Therefore we should put it in its cage and leave the cage in a dark place, such as a closet.
So we left the hamster to hibernate and soon the closet developed an alarming odor. Even us kids soon figured out what the odor meant, but since we were hoping for the hamster’s speedy recovery from hibernation, we were in denial as to the fact that it would never run on its wheel again and chose not to say anything to Mom. Maybe the smell would just go away?
It did. My mother, who has sinus problems, finally noticed the odor and conceded that Hamilton the hamster had gone to the great wheel in the sky. I can’t remember whether she gave him a Christian burial in the yard or simply flushed his rank corpse when we were at school.
I don’t know exactly what happens during galvanizing, but there’s a vaporized metal/acid/ kick you in the throat type atmosphere. At a former job, I often had to make deliveries and pick ups at a galvanizers and so developed an “inhale at exactly the right moment and literally sprint through the place grabbing parcels or tossing envelopes as I run” strategy.
Skunks, beta-mercaptoethanol, and pyridine are also all bad.
Thiophenol comes close.
Tributylphosphine (and presumablly its relatives) make them smell like fine French perfumes by comparison. Take the worst attributes of all of them, add rotting garlic, sour eggs, and spoiled milk, throw them into a blender, put them into a distillation retort and rectify them, and you can come close to this vilest of vile materials. I have smelled the sign of Hell and IT IS tributylphosphine.
Ah yes, the dreaded Anal Glands - actually dogs, and cats, both have them, but dogs seem to have the worst problem with them becoming impacted. You know when your dog drags his hiney across the carpet? More than likely he has impacted anal glands, rather than worms. Oh, and the smell - NAAASSSTY! In fact, it was one of the two things that I immediately thought of, when I opened this thread. I used to work at a Veterinary hospital, and expressing anal glands is a very common proceedure, for the aforementioned impactions, as well as general hygiene during baths, and such. Yuck!
The other worst smell, for me, would be bile. Nothing like the smell of a human rotting from the inside out. My sister in law had pancreatic cancer that had spread to most of her intestinal tract, stomach, etc. They had done a drain, several times, but could never get rid of all the (nasty, pure black) bile, and so the smell was always faintly present in their house. shudder About a year, or so, after she died, I was working in a residential home for people who had suffered tramatic brain injuries, and one of the residents also had massive intestinal problems, and had most of them removed, at one time, or another, over the years. While I was there, he had another bad attack, and had to have even more intestines removed, when he returned to the home, he had a bile bag inserted, which we would have to drain, every half an hour, day and night. That smell, MY GOD, that smell! It’s probably the single reason why I no longer work in health care!
My dog-we had to have her put to sleep back in February. I loved that dog to death, but she had the RANKEST breath. It was absolutely foul.
Our former nextdoor neighbors were the grossest bunch of neandrethals you’d ever come across. Their dogs would shit in the yard, and instead of scooping it, they’d leave it there. And when mowing the lawn, they’d run OVER it. On a warm day, you couldn’t even go outside in the backyard-the stench was so powerful.
My cat Noel used to insist on having her food dish put on the stove for her to eat. Once, she wolfed it down and then proceeded to vomit all over the burners. Some of it got down under the stovetop, and later on, my mother was heating something up on the stove. The entire downstairs smelled like burnt catfood.
A broken sweeper belt-just this oozing burnt rubber stench. Ick ick ick!