[Tsundoku]

Shinrei, on 23 October 2010 - 08:32 AM, said:

Maybe not the worst, but the most recent -

New rule here at the Shin household - no gutting of squid for pasta when trash day is still 5 days away.

Ugh - that's why my family always put the leftover 'bits' in the freezer until bin day.

Worst smell for me? Couldn't rightly say for sure, but there was this one time (at Uni camp), when we had a particularly boozy week (or three). I think it was (Dis)Orientation Week ... 1993 (?). Anyhoo, a mate had gone missing for a couple of days, and we couldn't track him down. This was before mobile phones, recall. Until we noticed one night there was a reek of gargantuan proportions starting to emanate from his room. Did I mention O Week is at the end of summer here?

Turns out he had been so horrifically shitfaced he had blown epic chunks all over his residential college room (we don't have that abominable practice called "room-mates" in our colleges here, remember). Was this the end of it - oh no, not at all, this was just the beginning of an olfactory atrocity. He passed out and came in and out of consciousness for a couple of days. We think he must have had alcohol poisoning - isn't hindsight great? During this period he pissed and shat himself and lived off the bottle of water next to his bed that I had thoughtfully provided for him the night we poured him into his bed. Right next to the bucket which he proceeded to carefully miss for the next day or so.

His room was on the top floor of a concrete building, at the north end, with a north facing window during an Australian summer (admittedly in Canberra, but you can still get 35+ in late February there). By the time he was able to rouse himself to answer the umpteenth knock at his door that he had finally noticed, the place was ... ripe.

So much so that it induced a domino-vomit effect when he opened the door and we went in to see if he was OK ...

Consider also by this stage I was a third year student who had seen (and smelled) a LOT, and was considered to be unflappable (I was always cleaning up after others when most people were gagging and staying away).
Nope, I barely made it to the toilet less than 10 metres away before I desecrated the basin, as someone else was already talking to God on the big white phone just inside.

Took us half a day to clean him and his room up, all the while with wet handkerchiefs over our noses. Had to swap half his carpet tiles out and distribute them over a bunch of other blocks after we cleaned them. Still took weeks for the smell to properly dissipate and the cleaning ladies never entered his room again.

This post has been edited by Sombra: 23 October 2010 - 09:11 AM

[Thelomen Toblerone]

Standing ankle deep in about a month's worth of backed up untreated human faeces, menstrual matter, and urine. Plus a bit of vomit from where we couldnt take the stench added on top.

Whole plumbing system where I was working essentially broke down, stored everything up for ages, then erupted when it couldnt any more. Running down from pipes, pumping up out of shower plugs, never have I seen so much shit. And we had to stand, the three of us, trying to mop it up. Two of us valiantly struggled for a while then had to leave when we could physically no longer stand it without retching incessantly. But a third, with I can only assume the iron stomach of a daemon, managed to carry on battling and holding it at bay until the industrial style cleaners arrived.

I so wish that was the only time I'd had a job that onvolved the mopping up of raw sewage, but alas.

When I said "I need the money, I'll do any job" in university holidays, I really should've stopped to think.

[Grimjust Bearegular]

Sombra, Thelomen: I salute you guys! Even trying to clean that shit up is an at of heroism in my book.


Mine's not so bad: My younger siblings' poop- smeared room on a warm Summer day:P

[King Lear]

My ex-boyfriend.
Apparently leaving him exacerbated the problem of his already poor hygiene habits. The combination of not cleaning himself, his clothes, or his bedding for weeks, along with his habit of chain smoking, drinking copious quantities of cask wine and very poor diet, caused a stomach upheaval when he drunkenly bear-hugged me at a mutual friend's drinks a month or two after the break-up.

EDIT: Spelling and pomposity.

This post has been edited by Crone: 24 October 2010 - 11:52 AM

[Mezla PigDog]

Spilling 5 mls of beta-mercaptoethanol on myself. I stank out a 2 storey, 100 room building for days....and a bus......and my shared house until I realised it was still on my trainers. It is mainly ethanol so it evaporates super fast and stays around as a vapour and it has sulphide groups attached so it totally honks of rotten egg. It is the main chemical in stink bombs. The only saving grace of it is that because you know it is pure chemical, you are mentally protected from the gag reflex that comes with the horrors of biological stenches.

Recently, I have started working on the bacteria Clostridium difficile. It is one of the hospital super bugs and is basically the shit bug! It causes extreme diarrhoea. It is also the culprit for the distinctive smell of poop. Cultures of it on a petri dish smell like pure, unadulterated turd. It sounds awful but it's not that bad because again, you know it isn't exactly crap, it is just a component of crap. Or I'm just getting used the horror perhaps????

[Tsundoku]

And they said biology was boring.

I don't suppose you could send me some of that stuff (either or both) in a super-reinforced (non- booby trapped) biohazard container? I have some ... research ... I would like to try out.

[cerveza_fiesta]

fermented biopesticide pumped out of a holding tank.

Worse than pumping out a septic tank if that says anything....

it smells like food, but in the worst possible way. The stinkory (stink memory) haunts me always.

[rhulad]

 Dead and rotting pig that was left in the sun for about a week before I had time to dispose of it (which becomes very difficult at with that level of decay since they are very liquidy). Or possibly the lagoon that held the urine and feces of 1800 hogs... could get pretty ripe. 




Edit: spelling

This post has been edited by rhulad: 12 November 2010 - 06:35 PM

[_Perfect_Insanity_]

The fattest woman I have ever seen, on the buss home.
When she lifted her arm, ugh,

I'm suprised she doesn't appear in my nightmares.

[Gust Hubb]

My word TT and Sombra. I definitely can't outdo those experiences. I can give you some of the worst smells i've experienced, but they are not that impressive....

First whiff of an autoclave following sterilization of fruit fly colonies.
Heavier individuals exercising on a hot day.
Opening the garbage can with baby diapers.
Cadavers.

[Loki]

My cousin's baby had really bad reflux and projectile vomited their formula all over the back of the car on the way to the hospital.
The parked in an unshaded car space.
It was a 42'C day.
Five hours later we were ready to leave and returned to the car.
We opened the doors..........

*shudder*

It was awful.

[Darkwatch]

An unholy mix of rotting sour cold processed meat, closed in smoker (you all know that smell, the kind of nut that smokes 50 packs a day in a closed in apartment and rolls around in the ash) and body odour of a person that has not washed in months and has done frequent physical exertion.
The worst part is that it hangs around even after the person is gone...
God I hate that smell.

[TaxManATX]

I worked the kennels at a no-kill animal shelter off and on for a while and there were plenty of bad smells there. The worst occurred pretty early on in my employment. A lady called up asking if we could take a dead cat she found so we could properly dispose of it. Long story short, this woman neglected to mention that they had found it about a week earlier and stored it in a trash bag in a trash can left outside in Texas in the summer. When I took the bag out of the trashcan to put it into our freezer the contents had liquified and the smell was absolutely horrid. Nothing compared cleaning up dog crap in the morning.

[Obdigore]

An old couple died down the hallway from us in our first apartment. No one realized it for a week. During a MN summer, and the apartments did not have AC (It was hitting 90+ F every day). When the police finally checked on them, the cop threw up all over the hallway (that is second hand I was not there at the time). They called in a biohazard cleanup crew. So we get home and they let us into the building, we have to walk by the room where these 3 guys in the full suits are pulling up the carpet and padding to remove it. I am not ashamed to admit I threw up. It was easily the most horrible thing I have ever smelled, and it lingered in the area for a week until they came in and cut out a section of the concrete floor and re-poured the concrete.

We actually stayed in a hotel for 3 days because we couldn't sleep with the smell. There is no way to get used to that smell in an enclosed space. We tried incense, which just increased the sickly-sweet odor.

[Traveller]

I smelled something the other day that reminded me exactly of a beach we went to when we were kids. It was a fishing village, and the beach was littered, mounded with hundreds of crab shells and discarded parts. The crab boats would come in, and they would boil up the catch in barrels and throw all the waste on to the beach. For weeks. In the summer, it was simply... overpowering. Rotting, sun heated shellfish.

The place I was reminded of this? I was in the emergency operating theatre last week... I won't go into detail, but the smell had people in the corridor outside the theatre department gagging it was so bad.
Lucky me, I was on the team working inside with it - even the surgeon said he'd never smelled anything quite so rancid.

Bleugh.

[Imperial Historian]

Quote

Spilling 5 mls of beta-mercaptoethanol on myself. I stank out a 2 storey, 100 room building for days....and a bus......and my shared house until I realised it was still on my trainers. It is mainly ethanol so it evaporates super fast and stays around as a vapour and it has sulphide groups attached so it totally honks of rotten egg. It is the main chemical in stink bombs. The only saving grace of it is that because you know it is pure chemical, you are mentally protected from the gag reflex that comes with the horrors of biological stenches.

A technician in my department dropped a 250ml bottle of this last week.

I've been working from home since.