What's the stinkiest odor you'e ever encountered?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

For your olfactory stimulation I present: the smell of fish tender holds.

Very, very, very briefly one summer I worked at a cannery in Alaska. Now, how this works is the fishermen and their boats go out and catch fishes, which they either haul back to shore to sell or sell onsite to a tender. Tenders are basically dead-fish middlemen. They buy fish at the site and then resell them to canneries. Ideally, a tender chugs out to the fishing area (a trip of somewhere between 3 and 18 hours - depending), buys up a passel of dead fish and then chugs immediately back to sell it - trying to keep the fish as cool as possible. This is generally accomplished (the fish cooling bits) by half filling the hold with chopped ice. If the tender doesn’t stay out too long, you have reasonably salable fish and what can be roughly described as a hold half full of sushi sno-cone.

The year I worked at the cannery, we had one particularly enterprising tender guy who had the brainstorm that if he waited until he’d filled up his hold before he came back to shore, he’d be much more efficient. Think of the savings in fuel alone!

Problem was, it took him almost 10 days to fill his hold with dead fish - his timing was bad. So, nearly two weeks after he set out, he came chugging back into port with his tender boat filled with fish that had been dead for up to 11 days. Ice will not stay frozen in July for 11 days.

You could smell him coming before you could see the boat. People were wandering around sniffing and making revolted faces and gagging trying to figure out what the stench was.

When he cracked open his hold, the retching started immediately.

Calculating by the volume of his hold and the fact that it was FULL (or nearly so) he had several TONS of dead fish that had been fermenting in a broth made of sushi sno-cone for nearly two weeks in 85 degree weather, complete with eau de drowned maggot garnish. There was also a sprinkling of assorted exceptionally decomposed bottom dwelling sealife - shrimp, crab, starfish, corals, snails.

He got mad when the cannery refused to purchase his “fish”. (I put fish in scare quotes because at that point they were less actual fish and more dead-fish-and-maggot smoothie with occasional chunks of more solid material).

He was even angrier when, by popular demand, he was required to move his boat out of the harbor until it had been sanitized - or possibly burned to the waterline. People weren’t picky.

102

Our chemists here know that putrescine and all its related organic compounds are not water-soluble. You can’t use an acid to get rid of butter.

If you do this, you end up with freshly lemon-scented hands over the continuing reek of decomp.

103

Now these are what I call credentials.

104

When a guy with 3,866 posts crowns you with a tiara, sometimes all you can do is blink.

Thank you, [bold]DeVena[bold].

I do like fresh bodies better.

Gabriela, dashing away tears of joy

105

So … Mr. Stuff and I are in a small town about an hour away on his day off, doing the touristy bit. We are enjoying the shops and the utterly wonderful coffee shop and the general not-having-to-do-anything of the day. We go to visit a cheese factory, because I have never seen cheese made. It’s a lovely stop. We step outside.

We are hit with the foulest smell I have ever experienced. Mr. Stuff – a farmer who has of necessity performed many disgusting deeds, and cut the head off a dog for a rabies test without a murmur – gagged. I, possessed of a weaker stomach, gagged until my stomach muscles hurt. I did not quite vomit. We dashed to the car and drove away. IT FOLLOWED US.

We keep driving, and stop at a nearby museum. We flee indoors, where the smell is considerably less, although it still ranked far above anything I have ever smelled in or around the farm. I ask the woman behind the desk what in God’s green earth the smell is.

Turns out there is a rendering plant nearby. Once a month or so, they heat up all the dead animals they’ve collected from the farmers in three or four counties and melt them down till they’re liquid. (I forget what it’s used for afterward.) We had the good fortune to be there in the summer, when the animals that had been waiting for a month had had the chance to become truly putrid before being rendered.

Dad may not be perfect, but in this case, he wasn’t pulling your leg.

I know it’s not the cheese factory’s fault, but every time we drive past it, my stomach turns over again.

106

Hello Gabriela, If you keep mentioning my name in threads and I continue to do vanity searches… people are going to start thinking I am stalking you. (By the Way, I love the new handbag you bought Tuesday!! (just kidding)) I believe once, when you mentioned Floaters I stated they were not so bad. Then again back when I was around in the field I had very little to no sense of smell. Which, as the sick bastard I am used to my advantage. The worse I was around (and I damn near puked) was a test where a body was dumped in a trunk of a err late 70’s (I want to say Chevy) and left out in the Tennessee Sun. Going out once or twice a day to monitor changes in Decomposition became quite a joy as the weeks progressed. After week three, It became the centerpiece of the latest “how has the biggest balls” game. Standing 2 feet downwind of the trunk was bad, He who could stand it the longest without puking won the “Mr Mancho award” The best time was 10 minutes, because at 8 minutes I Broke out a Meat ball sandwich wrapped in Aluminum foil out of my pocket and proceeded to eat grin
To sum up things. 5 weeks the trunk was opened, Everyone (almost I turned green, and had to retreat a few steps) ran and found a quiet place to puke.
The Chevy Crock pot, had turned the remains into soup. a nasty smelling foul soup. A smell so foul, had it been served to Satan himself in hell, He would repent and beg god to forgive him.

Most of my Ick moments were visual not olfactory.

Osip

107

I just want to say the first Google ad, as I write this, offers to help you if you suffer from fishy vaginal odor - Aangelica.

Snork.

I am reminded of a devious maneuver performed by my once boss. If you have been beatified by an exchange with the World’s Smartest Human, Cecil Adams, imagine what it was like to work at close range for four years for the smartest man in the South. He defied the stereotype of the dumb Southerner by becoming its antitype. Mycroft Holmes was a piker next to him. Deep Blue would have run scared of his political acumen in the games people play.

He also, naturally, played dumb Southerner whenever it was of use to him.

A couple of years before I joined his staff, the Dept of Health started eyeing the upper two floors of his building, an ex-ENT hospital that Forensics had taken over. Admittedly, he wasn’t doing much with the topmost floor, storing photographic materials there and so forth, but he had plans for both floors. The DOH informed him that they were summarily taking those two floors away for their own use, and would be coming over next Wednesday to inspect their future possession.

He was nothing but courtly as he invited them to inspect to their heart’s desire. He then called his office manager, a woman as loyal to him as she was capable. He said to her, “You remember those old research brains that have been decomposing down in the basement for two years? I want you to get three or four of those brains out. I want you to put them on a cart, and tour them very slowly around all the offices on the second floor, just before the visitors come. And I want you to instruct all the staff to say, “Whut Smell???”.”

Needless to say, he still was sole possessor of both those floors the day I arrived.

Can’t match Osip’s guy in the trunk or the mesquite-toasted Texan, but there is a special smell to rotting brain that has to be experienced to be believed. And maybe it’s better not experienced nor believed.

108

Yes, but did Bill Bass throw up?

My money’s on Not.

109

Are you kidding?

No he did not. how could you even think otherwise?

110

It proves it. Forensic anthropologists are TOUGHER than forensic pathologists.

111

I feel really embarassed admitting this but years ago I broke one of my front teeth and have a crown replaced over it. Well once it got loose so I had to go to the dentist to get it reattached. When they took the crown off, the dead tooth underneath smelled SO BAD. I couldn’t believe that smell was coming from my own mouth and that the crown covers it up on a day to day basis.

I SWEAR you can’t smell it while the crown is in. but I know what lies beneath…

112

I can remember three instances that were pretty rank. The first was back in high school when I’d first started to drive. My parents were out of town so I met some friends out at a lake for an overnight camp and cookout. We were just old enough to buy beer so we’d done just that in larger than prudent amounts. All I remember is waking up the next morning on the bench seat of my mom’s new Monte Carlo only to discover I’d explosive vomited throughout the entire passenger area and beyond, even covering the dash and ac vents. It was freakin everywhere and it appeared I’d been sure to lay down a primer layer and then two coats of weatherbeater. Nauseous and hung over I had to drive that stinkmobile to the car wash where I just opened both doors and turned the high powered spray on the inside of the car until I ran out of quarters. At home I spent countless more hours shampooing the carpet and q-tipping all the cracks trying to get last week’s predigested meals out, gagging throughout. Ugh, I still get nauseous just thinking about it.

Mr. Hutchinson was a reeker too. Overweight, dirt poor, slovenly old windbag that lived next to me when I was a college student. In three years I never was aware of him taking a shower and you absolutely had to stay upwind of him while he told his longass stories or you’d puke. He didn’t have a skin condition, the flaky layers around his armpits and neck were just coats of funk and sweat that had cracked. Even his chest looked like a playa.

When I worked in Anaktuvak Pass, Alaska, we were in permafrost so the crappers were what they called honeybuckets. Essentially, everyone took a shit in the same pail and they tried to cover the group stench with this godawful blue perfumy liquid. The smell permeated everything. You could smell it all the way out to the helicopter pad yet they’d put the cafeteria right next to the bathroom. Everyone put off taking a dump until they were about to blow up.

113

Many moons ago when I was a cop, I had the pleasure of going into a house where a fellow had ODed. It was summertime, there was no air conditioning and the windows were closed. And he had been in there for 5 days before the neighbors called about the smell. He was all over the walls and the ceiling.

That’s where I learned the trick of dumping coffee grounds into a skillet and setting the skillet on the stove. When the grounds start to burn, they will overpower the odor of decomposition. But to this day, 30+ years later, whenever I open a can of Folger’s, I get a flashback to that day.

114

A bit over a year ago, a very drunk guy tried for hours to get into my apartment, thinking it was his friend’s despite being told otherwise by me. He puked all down the wall just outside my door. There are simply no words to describe the smell. I dumped a whole box of baking soda on it with no effect. The custodian cleaned it up the next day (I felt very very sorry for him) but it still had managed to etch itself into the linoleum tiles on the floor outside, and when it got humid in that hall, you could still smell it months after the fact.

I guess if I was to try to describe it, imagine taking a bowl of vomit, diarrhea, beer, vodka and vinegar and heating it up in a microwave. That was pretty much what that was like.

115

You were a cop?

Story, please…

116

Oh, I just remembered one my dad told me once about his worst smell. He used to be a cable technician and one time he got a call to a house where a man reported that his cable had suddenly stopped working. All the connections in the guy’s house were normal, so my dad went to check the line outside, where the guy sheepishly admitted that he had buried his great dane in the backyard a few days earlier, and was only now realizing that he may have cut the cable line doing that. Lo and behold, he had, and the rotting dog had to be exhumed in order to get to and replace the line.

117

When moving 2,678 miles across the country I treated the moving-truck guys on the West Coast to doughnuts and chocolate milk. Chocolate milk in half-litre bottles.

One of the guys absently put his litre in the unplugged fridge, sealed the fridge with tape, and loaded it on the truck. Truck then left with my stuff and meanders through just about every state in the U.S. in mid-July heat.

Two weeks later the moving truck pulls up on the other side of the country at my new house. Moving guys brought the fridge into the house: stink waves immediately filled the house and they had to take the fridge outside and put it doors-down as far away as possible.

The moving company insisted on having the fridge cleaned by a professional before they would consider coughing up the bucks for replacement. Said professional arrives, opens up the fridge, throws up* in* the fridge, runs to her car and skids away – screaming, I believe.

Thanks, United Van Lines, for my nifty new fridge!!!

118

Yeah! Clothy, you were a cop? I wanna hear stories too. Pleeease? :smiley: Silver sits back, popcorn in hand, waiting patiently for story time…

119

My parents grow and sell corals. They have about 15 aquariums all on one system. There’s a “skimmer” to remove organic debris and other pollutants out of the water and of course fish poop. About once a week it has to be emptied and cleaned. That smell is absolutely disgusting.

A dead rotting sea anemone is also at the top of my list of “most foul smells”.

120

Although I could never hope to touch gabriela’s rank and oozing tiara of decomposition… I humbly submit:

Tampon removal, after said tampon has been forgotten in a vagina for approximately two weeks. Imagine, if you will, the… quaint odor of rotting cotton soaked in a combination of festering menstrual blood and mucopurulent vaginal discharge, brought to the party by our friend Trichomonas Vaginitis. Did I mention the patient had been having vaginal sex without a condom regularly during that two weeks? Add to the charming mix a healthy dose of rotting semen.

Tampon removals require an exam room be completely out of commission for the rest of the day. None of our windows open for airing. You’d be surprised at how often something like this happens. I will never use a tampon ever again for the rest of my entire life.