The Worst Smell You Have Ever Known

Runner-up: One night at a club I wound up near a guy who was smoking a vanilla-scented cigar. Now, vanilla smells nice, and some cigars smell nice, but the combination was peculiarly offensive.

Neither compare to the horror that is the Restaurant Dumpster in the Summertime. Ugh.

Very true, especially if the person also smokes. I've had to work with some people whose breath ought to be banned under international treaties against chemical warfare.

http://www.learnaboutenergy.org/focus/oil-refinery.jpg

I've been kinda phlegmatic these past few weeks, and I was keeping an empty beer bottle within reach of my computer desk so I could dispose of my loogies with a minimum of fuss. But eventually the phlegm, er, fermented (?) from mixing with the beer residue at the bottom of the bottle, and the smell was atrocious.

The other day I accidentally knocked the bottle over. I had to keep the window wiiiiiiide open all night to get the sulfur-like smell out of my room. It was that bad.

http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~mukluk/ta702.jpeg

Flies dig it.

After a while, urine starts to smell of amonia.

Most bad smells were in China. I saw traintoilets overflowing with feces.

Lots of smells and tastes were knew to me over their and today people were having barbecue and the smell of charcoal reminded me of China too. Brings back lots of nice memories.

I find bad smells just as interesting as good smells.

Okay, I couldn't breathe through my nose when I was young. I had a series of operations to improve this. The last of them involved the insertion of two plastic tubes, one up each nostril, to reshape my nose. They had to stay there for two or three weeks, and were held in place by nylon cord through a hole drilled between my nostrils. I seemed to produce a lot of mucus while they were around, or maybe it was just more noticeable, because after a while it crusted in place, and prevented more from leaving. It stayed in my nose, and one way or another it rotted or festered or something. By the time it was removed, which was agony, the smell was easily the worst I've ever known.

Though it is somewhat cliched, the poor man drowned in a bowl of soup.

yeah, smell is one of the more underrated senses. The ability is has to bring back memories is much stronger than other senses.

You want to grill meat? Good -- first, clean the grill after every use, second, buy good quality lean meat with very little in the way of fat, and third, please season them creatively. Then I'll eat your offerings. Otherwise, I think I'll grab something beforehand.

Also, cooked egg that gets trapped in something in the sink and rots is foul and wont budge when you clean it.

And the smell of human shit and puke makes me so nauseous.. I could never be a doctor or nurse, ugggghh. I loathe bad smells. Its like that novel Perfume - people who smell odd/bad, no matter how lovely they may be otherwise, transform mysteriously into someone I dont wanna be around. Its like a bad aura.

Even fairly mildly amounts of scent can make my nostrils sear with pain if I get close enough, so I really hate it when I can smell people, and lord knows there's always one (usually more) in every crowd who completely overdoes it. I've even encountered people who I could smell twenty-thirty yards away. Even worse: people on the subways who don't bathe and use heavy amounts of perfume or cologne as cover, thinking AH-HA! the nice pleasant smells will triumph over any rank sweaty smells! I am GENIUS! when in fact what streams from their body in Pepe-Le-Pew-like fashion are not one but TWO truly putrid odors that will fry the nerve-endings in any poor nose within a fifty-yard radius.

Does anybody remember the MTV special that followed around these two sad guido brothers around as they went to pick up chicks in Jersey clubs? There was a scene where one of them sprayed himself with cologne FIFTY TIMES (MTV counted) in the matter of a couple minutes!

after a month of fishing, these pieces would glow in the dark.

on a boat that smelled of fish and unwashed dutchmen, i would still retch whenever i had to enter the factory (which was twelve hours a day).

the last day of the trip, i had to crawl under a freezer to pick up these glowing fish pieces. it was in my hair. and nose.

i want to cry now.

and burning hair

and cilantro (however the hell you spell that, it's the Devil's herb I tell you)

my dumpster tends to smell like a bum's nutsack.

a. vast fields fertilized with excrement
b. a sewage processing plant
c. a dump

thats quite funny but my answer is still - you

fucking 9/11 smell

When I was a student the fridge in our basement conked out one weekend while we were all away during the middle of the summer. We returned to the smell of rotting food - fish in particular, and it took days for the place to return to normal. I stayed at my girlfriend's place because I couldn't handle it.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I did Ctrl-F for "onion" and "potato" and thereby determined that you are all unaware of 2 of the foulest odors on earth: putrefied onions and potatoes. When I worked at a grocery store I accidentally handled a potato so rotten that it had liquefied on one end, and oh my brothers and others, that stench stuck to my hand well into the next day. Rotting onions are as bad.

Chicken houses in Wilkes County, NC--you drive by them all the time. There is the chicken shit mingled with the smell of those hens who perished in the "litter."

In a related story: I was on a CTA subway that smelled exactly like a Tyson chicken house. I recognized the smell in this context as a person I had encountered before, and who I could only identify as a crumpled mass of clothes with 2 hands and filthy, long, matted brown hair. This person's smell was so bad that it literally stung my nostrils. Some riders fled through the doors joining the cars, others waited till the train stopped and ran to the adjoining cars.

fucking 9/11 smell

I went to NY for my honeymoon in November 2001. Bought tickets in August, debated going for a while post 9/11, then went anyway.

The big pile of rubble was still on fire and I can still vividly smell it when I think about it - it was like electrical fire, musty old building, all kinds of terrible rolled into one.

When I worked at a grocery store I accidentally handled a potato so rotten that it had liquefied on one end, and oh my brothers and others, that stench stuck to my hand well into the next day. Rotting onions are as bad.

I worked in the produce section of a grocery store back in high school. We were located right next to the dairy section, and us produce workers would have frequent contests with the dairy guys to see who could come up with the foulest shit. The consensus was that produce had a higher frequency of rotten, disgusting products while the degree of rottenness/disgustingness of spoiled dairy was in fact worse.

I caught a whiff of it last night when I forgot not to walk past the Deutsche Bank building

burning human flesh

umm..

relax, I got a wart removed.
still.

hahah ok

If you had the misfortune of being near plane/car crashes that is a smell you would know. (I don't have firsthand knowledge but my mother has explained this as the worst smell ever.)

it's asbestos and burnt plastic. the 9/11 smell. and a soupçon of a few other things we don't need to get into. mostly an industrial waste smell.

A friend recently said the same as sD recently, from being present when someone's face got badly burned in a firearms accident. He actually presented the story as the reason he could never cook and eat a steak at 3am. I'm like HI DERE DRUNK FOODS I will eat all yous but was voted "gross". And it's sort of hard to argue with someone who's been in a med-evac w/ cooked face.

This is not a patch on the gag-inducing stories above, but it was revolting at the time. I was cooking breakfast and cracked an egg into the frypan. Green slime splashed all over the bacon and splattered on me. The stench was intensified by the heat and I threw up in the sink as I madly tried to scrub the rotten egg off my hand.

Another evil, evil smell is when the milk reservoir has been left in the espresso machine at work over the weekend. I emptied it on Monday and a solid mass of stinking white vileness glugged into the sink.

There are so many horrible odors in the world, it's difficult to rank them. Is it true that if X and Y are bad odors, then X + Y is worse than either X or Y? If so, then the worst odor ever has gotta be something like rotting human corpses + car accidents + rotten eggs + liquified potatoes + 9/11 + chicken shit + cigs + nutsack de la bum + vomit + rendering plant + dead whale + stinkbomb + chemical Ali + bellybutton + dead goat + halitosis + loogies + toilet.

Now, imagine a scenario where all of those odors happen simultaneously.

"nutsack de la bum"

I can confirm a friend of mine has smelt burnt human flesh - his own, his hair and face caught fire when he was a kid - and he said it really does smell like cooked meat, pork/bacon mostly, and he cant stomach pork anymore.

cow rumen contents. one of the first practicals at uni involved looking at samples of cow rumen contents on a microscope slide to see the single celled animals called entodiniomorphs that live in it. I still remember the smell -- it was horrid.

The Tyson chicken plant--from the car, no less. Driving through some small town in Kentucky I think, and there it was. A vague, oily, sweet rotten rutabaga mixed with cooked chicken smell. And you couldn't get away from it.

wait... where is the "bum's nutsack" joke from?

Bad Santa? Is that right?

A shout-out to CAT DIARRHEA!
We have friends who adopted a sickly kitten. The diarrhea was so deadly that they named the cat "Bhopal."

That was very tasteless of them, I know.

meconium

lol @ revulsion from snowden's secret

liquid fertilizer and popcorn "butter" get my vote

Our sink today has started to smell like someone ate some very rank cheese, threw it up then done a shitty on top of it.

oh, speaking of cheese, juliaA had a container labelled "stinky cheese," and I opened it, and gagged and coughed and had to leave the room. Next time I will believe the label.

I understand that it really is tasty, though.

a friend who posted on here a few times long ago (remember the White Soul thread?) has had a few of these disgusting moments before. mostly because he is disgusting.

1. another friend decided to get back at him for some shit by putting a fresh squirrel carcass in an old chinese food box and leaving it in a dark corner of his room. a few days passed, and the smell was UNREAL. after a week, my disgusting friend found the source of the smell when he saw a weird tail sticking out of a chinese food box he'd thrown in the trash.

2. so, disgusting friend and girlfriend get black-out drunk, fuck, and vomit everywhere. he cleans up what he can find. needless to say, what he found wasn't all of it, and after four months, his room was uninhabitable-- he actually got charged for fumigation fees by the college.

3. same friend doesn't refrigerate eggs. leaves them around for close to two months. again, room is uninhabitable.

i'd imagine pig shit lagoons are pretty horrible, judging by this:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters/2

he lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

disgusting friend and girlfriend get black-out drunk, fuck, and vomit everywhere

both of them? at the same time? WHILE FUCKING? that's like simultaneous orgasms, only horrifying and the work of the devil.

OH GREAT http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/09/11/2007-09-11_epa_toxins_leaked_into_air_after_deutsch.html

my kitchen sink drain at the moment.

anyone recommend a decent detergent to throw down there?

cereal factories smell bad for miles.

on day to day type smells, coffee and tea make me sick to my stomach. oh also those little colored craker thingies people eat.

oh, and poop

My kitchen sink 'burps' occasionally, the smell is like really bad ass wind.

We've tried all sorts of bleaches, unblockers etc which work for a while but the reek always comes back.

was at a show the other night and went to the bar to get a drink, saw a friend of mine from a few feet away and she had her hand cupped around her nose and was saying something like 'omg i can hardly breathe' and then as i got closer this horrible horrible fart smell, a smell that had cruel depth and weight, hit me and i couldn' even go say hi to my friend - i just blindly turned and walked the other way, shoulder checking a guy so i could get out of there fast. that is how awful and powerful the stench was.

wtf people you are in a sold-out small-venue situation - try to at least make it to the bathroom or outside or at least not right next to teh bar, it is not so hard. also, what are you eating b/c maybe it is not right for you

Ste, try dumping some baking soda into yr drain and following it w/ a cup of vinegar. Apply once a month to keep drains clean & free of minor obstruction (obviously won't help if you get, like, a giant bolus of hair down it or something, but it cleans out the slow gunk). And it's ecologically friendly, unlike commercial unblockers.

i love that you used the word 'bolus'

also, hair apparently cannot be destroyed!! it has to be manually dragged out from the drain using a snake or undo-ing the pipes. also, v v gross looking and awful smelling when pulled out. v v bolus-like yeah

i know this b/c the previous tenants in my apartment were both women with thick longish hair. and so am i (but i use one of those drain traps in the shower/bath) and over time that becomes not a good scene. weirdly though, the problem in my place was with the kitchen & bathroom sinks and hair. which is weird b/c i don't exactly put my hair down those sinks. yet there was hair bolus. not my fault, is what i said.

A plumber's snake is a useful thing to have in the hall closet w/ the tool box.

aye, it's my kitchen sink so there shouldn't be any hair down there (also i have none ha)

i will try the baking soda thing, cheers

you know what else really reeks - fishtanks when you clean them. ugh.

trichiosinkobeozar

byron nelson's hairbrush

During the fall semester of my ninth grade year, my civics class instructor had us do one of those married-with-an-egg-child experiments. After grades had been doled out, I relocated the egg-child (hard-boiled and with a minor fracture) to an airtight tupperware container and placed it in an unclaimed locker, where it remained undisturbed until the end of the school year. On the last day of school, I removed the egg-child, still tupperware-bound, from the locker and took it with me on the bus-ride home. As my stop was one of the closest to school, the bus was still mostly full when I exited -- and immediately before I walked down that aisle, I removed the lid from the container and stuck the egg-child underneath my seat.

I later learned that the intensity of the smell was so awful that the driver pulled the bus over and evacuated the children while she searched for the source of the odor. Kind of a prick-move, I admit, but hey - I was 13.

grease traps are bad. Also - Rotorua! Sulphur, cripes.

seriously though the worst smell I have ever known is actually the ICU where the burns unit is in Royal Perth Hospital. I felt like I couldn't get that smell out of my hair for days after visiting someone in there.

my kid threw up all over our living room for about three hours last night, so I think my own house may be the worst smell i've ever known right now

fox shit! i rescued a fox from some kids and took it to a shelter in my car, on the way it shat on the seat. i swear i have never smelt anything like it in my life, it gave me a headache instantly.

i have so many questions

If I worked at the shelter, I'd be all like "We don't take fucking foxes!"

Did you make the fox where his seatbelt?

Isn't this more a case of rescuing kids from the fox

Did you at least give the fox a couple of cigarettes before you sped away?

wanko,

why not?
no
no, it was young and weak
i don't smoke, so i wouldn't have had any. if i did, i would have wanted them for myself.

I once smeared Pritt Stick over a halogen lamp. When it heated and vapourised, the resulting smell was staggering in its brutality.

people with cheesy feet

Neuze came up to me about a month ago, I think it was her, and just said, "very bad smell", and pointed toward the ICU. I knew it had to be bad, because she never complains about anything. We have seperate bins for the contaminated/toxic waste. It was soooooooooo bad. I still don't know what it was. It might have been rotting poop mixed with some sort of heavy medicine or something? I still don't know. It was the first time in almost two years that I actually had to step out of one of the soiled utility rooms just so I could catch my breath and get the smell out of my face. And I have smelled some really really bad stuff. I practically ran thru the hospital with my little cart to get this bag of foulness out into the freezer where we keep the dangerous stuff.

My car's been overheating, and giving off this rank, acrid smell, to which is added the naked fear of breaking down in the middle of motorway traffic on the way home from work.

The dead rat that made the warehouse I once worked in unbearable for a week or so one summer. We couldn't find out where the little bastard had expired. When we did find it, it was a writhing ball of maggots and fur.

that reminds me of a good dead rat story. there was a horrifying smell coming from somewhere in the kitchen of an old apartment that i shared with my friend lance in philly. we couldn't figure out where it came from. then when we moved i cleaned under the sink and found a long dead rat with its head chewed off. by a live rat, i suppose. nastiest discovery of the source of a nasty smell, lemmetellya.

i had a dead mouse under the floorboards of another apartment i lived in. i had to spray air freshener on the floor where it was every day or it became unbearable. it finally rotted enough that the smell went away.

also there was this time when i had to go into this office to do some work on the computer there, and before i went in someone warned me about possible BO. i was like, oh how bad could it be, and then as soon as i walked in, the smell hit me, it was so bad, almost smelled chemical! then i spent the next 4 hours inside this room with this dude, none of the windows open. everytime i breath in i know i'm basically taking in particles of his sweat glands, that thought was worse than anything.

i think i never i appreciated clean air as much as i did when i finally got out of there.

A few years ago I started work at a new job, and it turned out that my predecessor had some batshit crazy idea that revolved around plastic milk bottle tops. He collected them and stored them unwashed in plastic bags in a closet in the workshop, which coincidentally was where the spare PC keyboards were kept.

Dhaka, Bangladesh.