AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
I’m traumatized just reading your story. Ag.
Why do you keep reading these stories, Anaamika? You know they’re bad for you.
The only bad maggot story I have is second hand. I’d been in email contact with a woman who’d had a pet bunny. And she passed on the story of how she realized he wasn’t well when she went to pet his back and the lower half of pelt fell off, revealing all the maggots that were living on his still-living flesh. At the time I was suffering from major insomnia (I went at least one week without sleeping more than ten hours. Total.) and I couldn’t get that image out of my head.
I have to ask: You honestly prefer maggots to spiders? Really?
Huh. Because I would personally rather be covered in spiders — spiders in my hair, my clothes, my ears — than have a single maggot sitting in the center of my rubber-gloved palm.
Maggots, man. Freak me out.
Zombie maggots, now, that’s the problem.
Count me in with Hal. Maggots are fine. I’m not about to keep one as a pet, but I don’t has the same visceral reaction to them as I do to spiders.
That reaction generally involves fire, and a lot of it.
Many years ago, I lived with this guy who worked at night. Thus, he slept in the daytime, and I was awake. One morning, after he had gone to bed, I discovered some sort of corn and rice mixture in a dish in the refrigerator. I assumed his mother had stopped by and passed on some of her leftovers, so I ate it. Not long after, I’m puking my guts out.
As I came to find out, one of my SO’s work buddies had left the food in his car for an extended period by accident. My SO put it in the refrigerator to await trash day and neglected to put a warning sign on it. :mad:
Anyway, the next day I was telling his work buddy what had happened to his corn and rice stuff. He looked stunned, put a hand on my arm, and said, “There wasn’t any rice in it!” :eek: :eek: :eek:
He was just pulling my leg, but I thought it was hilarious. And aren’t you glad there aren’t any *real * maggots in this story? 
What’s with all the maggot stories?
Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew
Well, I wouldn’t do the reverse of your post…I’d certainly take a spider in the middle of my gloved palm over having a bucket of maggots dumped on my head…but yeah.
Spiders = ultimate evil.
Maggots = harmless, wriggling grains of rice.
I think I can go as far as to say that I’d stick my arm, up to the bicep, into a 55-gallon drum of maggots on a $100 bar bet.
Nothing can gross out a garbageman. For a peek inside this world I highly reccomend urban weekly cartoonist John Backderf’s epic 48 page comic Trashed. His other comic about going to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer is also quite good but has fewer maggot stories.
Damn, forgot to relate my own maggot story. I was out shooting my M4 replica and found that some new production British SS109 ammo was feeding terribly. Frustrated I opened a box of slightly vintage surplus south american made ammo. Inside the cardboard packs were cartridges and bazillion dried out fruit fly maggots. I tried the ammo out and was suprised to find that if fed and ejected perfectly in my rifle. I can only conclude that dessicated ground maggot powder is an superior dry lubricant.
I feel ill now. Maggot. Bleah…sounds like a noise you’d make as you’re vomiting a big cheesy block of stew eaten an hour before. Ricotta sounds the same way. : hurk :
Ricotta with magggots in it.
I’m gonna hurl…
I also drink two cups of coffee a day and sleep late too often. I’m not new to doing things that are bad for me. 
Besides, it’s a sort of morbid fascination.
These are some great maggot stories y’all! Keep ‘em comin’! They keep me entertained and keep Anaamika grossed out! It’s all win-win!
I kind of like maggots. They’re cute. They don’t tend to hang out in the most savory places, but you can’t have everything. And I would much rather stick my entire arm into a barrel of maggots than a barrel of spiders!
I used to work for a sardine factory. Every winter, when work was slow, some of us would be sent down to a warehouse where old products was stored. This old product was often set aside for some kind of defects and needed to be hand culled. There were some ladies who worked there year 'round, but they couldn’t possibly keep up with all of the product that was stored, so by the time we came out in the wintertime, most of the product we were culling had been sitting in a hot warehouse all summer.
So, the product would be brought to us in it’s packaged state, in wrapped boxes and sometimes wrapped cans, depending on the product. Usually the defects were nothing major, we would just reinspect some product for faulty seams, dents that were too big, loose tabs, etc.
Sometimes the products had to be inspected for pinholes. And open cans.
Open cans of sardines that had been sitting the entire summer in a sweltering warehouse.
We would be given rubber gloves, and off we went. Sometimes the goods would be salvagable, with no defects in the entire case. Good, clean cans. Ready to be shipped.
Other times, we had to salvage what we could. Sometimes, there was a package that had one end that was white, bulging, and* breathing*. We had to save what cans we could from those cases and throw out the offending cans. Any cans that had maggots touching them were dumped into a sink full of water and Mr. Clean. I tell you, I was put on can washing duty one night, and I was in the deepest pits of hell. Standing in front of a sink of yellow water with dead floating maggots in it… ugh.
Then one night on the line, we all saw it: sitting on top of the pallet, a firmly wrapped package… it was entirely white. It was moving. It was alive. One of the men placing product on the table in front of us grinned at our dismayed faces… and as a joke, he put it in front of one of the girls beside me. I stepped back just out of instinct and stopped working. Other girls on the other side of me stopped, as well, and the girls on her other side did, too. We all watched that awful, bulging package. There was nothing good in that.
The girl laughed and said she wanted to open it and clean the cans! Our supervisor was a kind lady, and she took one look at that thing and said, “Oh, no, no, there’s nothing good in there, just throw the whole thing in the garbage.” The girl began to scream! “It’s my job! I want to do it!” Everyone, us, the supervisor, and finally the boss yelled at her to let it be, throw the damn thing out. We were very upset on the line, because… well. Don’t let anyone tell you that maggots can’t hop. If she opened up that hellbox, we would have all gone home to avoid the leaping, crawling, oogy maggots. Well, I would have gotten stuck there helping the clean up, since my mother was one of the dayshift supervisors and my father is a foreman, and I was expected to have some kind of sense of duty to the company. But that would have been the end of production for the night and the beginning of an awful clean up.
They finally got the case away from the kooky girl, though. But they had to - honest to Og - wrestle it from her hands. How it didn’t open in that struggle, I’ll never know.
The girl cried in the lunchroom, saying it was unfair how they wouldn’t allow her to do her job. She bitched about it for weeks. Listen, lady, we didn’t take the thing away because we didn’t think you could do your job, we took it away for our own sanity. We had a hard enough time sleeping that winter as it was.
Maggots are oogy. I’ve worked among fish fertiliser and wharf rats, and nothing quite freaks me out as bad as maggots.
No no no no!
Spiders = Tickly little guys who eat other annoying bugs
Maggots = Animated putrescence whose goal in life is to eat your flesh while you are still alive.
I have a bunch of maggot stories, living on a ranch as I did, but the worst (or best?) happened when we still lived in town. My father got me a summer job at a local stable just beyond the edge of town. Naturally my parents weren’t going to drive me to work so my bike ride took me all over in order to get over the freeway. One of the places I passed was this nasty ‘farm’ with a couple of sad old horses, goats, and various vehicles dissolving into the soil.
One monday I notice one of the horses isn’t standing and as I get closer I can see he’s dead. Poor horsey. After work, he’s still there-- maybe they needed to borrow equipment to get the body moved and buried or something. The next morning the horse is still there, swollen, legs straight up in the air (which I had never known could actually happen). He looked like an over-filled balloon, so I peddled as far from the enclosure as possible, just in case.
By wednesday he wasn’t so swollen, legs flopped back down on the dirt. Thursday and friday were more of the same. I was very glad for the weekend because a horse dead for a week in summer temps of 115 is not a pretty sight, but that’s nothing compared to the stench. There was no other route I could take and it never occurred to me to tell my parents about any of it. Maybe the owners were waiting till the weekend to take care of it. Wrong. So monday I pedaled toward the horror, which announced it’s pungent presence at about twenty yards. At fifteen yards you could hear the insects buzzing, so many it was like a high pitched wave machine. You could taste that poor dead thing at ten yards, and I just stopped trying to breathe. Which turned out to be a big mistake later. Even though I tried not to look, I looked. After looking, I lost all co-ordination and had to stop pedaling.
You know how others mentioned a maggoty carcass sort of wiggled? This horse was dancing the freakin’ Lambada. Half of the hide was covered in a lacy blanket of maggots that would writhe around and up the bones sticking through the gore-covered skin and then pour down like hell’s version of a champagne fountain. Beetles and other things were all over the place, peeping up out of the holes in the skin, erupting through new openings. Dark fluids stained the dirt around the body and small gobbets of rotting flesh had been drug outward, by some scavenger I’d guess, and were host to even more maggots and other insects.
At that point, I was paralysed by the abomination three yards away. This was very unwise, because it meant I got a front row seat for the debut of Giant Flesh Eating Beetle and his Dancing Maggot Review, live (ha!) from the Horse’s Sort of Empty Eye Socket. The be-slimed beetle poked and fought it’s way through the sort of gelatinous remains of the eye-ball and went stumbling on his way. That performance was followed by about a half cup of maggots, wriggling in a fresh stream of pus and gore down what was left of the horse’s cheek.
That’s when I finally moved, but not in a good way. The whole time I’d been holding my breath and so right there, at the birthing of every nightmare I would have for the next decade, I reflexively took a deep, gulping breath of the most befouled air on the continent. Among other nasty things, I’ve smelled pig farms, and I’ve smelled the worst slums in Mexico-- they were all springtime lilacs in comparison. The only good thing to be said about taking that breath was that it caused my throat to slam shut and petrified the contents of my stomach so that I was unable to vomit. Because I wanted to vomit. In fact, I needed to vomit forever, and if at all possible I wanted my memory of that morning to be the first thing I puked. But no such luck, just occasional full-body dry heaves whenever I’d have a flash back (which was every five minutes since I worked at a stable).
That evening, after putting off the ride home for a good two hours, I rode by and it was gone. Cleaned up almost as if it were never there. I’d still like to know if they’d been forced by the county to finally clean it, or rotting had been the plan all along. In my opinion, I’d rather have to hack a dead horse into pieces than wait till it rotted into a maggot befouled more manageable size. Bleh.
So…who wants to talk about popping pimples?
Indy, why does the rice move?
And the Requisite “Band Name” Reference for the Thread Award goes to lieu:
All these posts, and no PICTURES?? What is WRONG with you people?!?
I give you: http://www.stinkymeat.net/ The hi-res images are a joy.
Oh great, the stinky meat guys! I saw the original experiment once, but lost the link!
Erm, Hal, it’s risky to make statements like that here Who’s in for 10 bucks of this action?
OK, my own story: when I was about 9, I found a baby bird in a field near our house. For some reason, I decided it was abandoned, and I could raise it at home. So I kept it in a tub in the garage and tried to feed it birdseed.
Naturally the poor thing died within 2 days. But I failed to dispose of the remains promptly.
When the predictable happened… well, my parents quite rightly refused to deal with it so I had to. Somehow I managed to get that maggoty bird wrapped up in tissue and tossed it into a field behind our house.
Fortunately for the local fauna, this was the last time I attempted to perform any independent wildlfe rescue.