Nothing tastes/looks/feels worse than....

[chile_peppa]

Many long years ago, I lived next door to a truly obnoxious man. One day, just before the weekly trash pickup, I cleaned out my freezer and threw out lots of fish that had been there way too long (leftover from a camping trip). This man's doberman got into my trash and strewed the fish all over his backyard. He yelled at me for throwing my trash in my own trash containers behind my garage. I told him he should keep his bloody dog in his own backyard or on a leash, and that he should be grateful that his brown, dead grass was finally being fertilized.

[johnnyd]

I went in to clean things out. I opened the refrig door and was faced with a crawling mass of maggots in both freezer and refrigerator.

More Fridge Follies:

I worked for a spell as one half of a demolition/clean-up team on fire and water damaged properties. My first week we started on a vacation home that had burned inside and was mired in insurance company bickering for four months.

I made the mistake of opening the fridge (it was a kitchen fire) and got slapped by the most disgusting smell imaginable. The contents must have been affected by the heat of the fire than sat for four months... I gag thinking about it.

My courageous colleague and I wrapped some heavy line around the thing and dragged it towards the exit, and the dumpster outside. At a certain point we had to "walk" the thing over an obstacle, corner by corner. A terrible odor hit our nostrils... The freaking thing was leaking some gawd-awful goo all over us and the floor.

I grabbed some duct tape and tightly wrapped the bottom part of the door hoping to create a better seal, and almost died doing it as the smell was mighty bad. Finally we couldn't stand it and the smoke residue was not helpful so we muscled our fridge down some back steps. This is when it really started pouring out of the cracks since the angle of the steps had stressed the door hinges.

The dumpster was one of those big container size ones but the delivery guy placed it so the door couldn't open more than about a foot. We had to lift this putrid, leaky, two hundred pound beast up over a six foot steel wall. It was really just the beginning 'cuz the door cracked as it hit the bottom and the vile, brown ooze was everywhere. Never before had I preferred the odor of charred, smoky wreckage over this olfactorial hell which we endured for another two days before we got a new dumpster.

From then on we tied up the things with commercial fishing rope and taped the doors without even thinking twice, then hand-cart their asses out of there. Whew!

[McDuff]

This is all nice and gross. I worked in my early 20's in an operating room and one night they brought in a kid who had a twisted intestine. They unzipped him, and the smell hit the ventilating system and went all over the very large hospital. OR's have slightly higher pressure than the rest of the place, so that when the doors open, air goes out. The surgical resident who was assisting the surgeon kept gagging, and getting yelled at.

Next day I was in the preop waiting area, tooling around in a little cart they rolled kids around in, and got nosy about what was in the little refrigerator. There was a petri dish kind of thing which I picked up, and turned over to read the label. Juice from the dish ran down my arm, and I realized it was the specimen from the kid the night before. I went screaming for the scub sinks and the phisohex.

This poor kid made it through that, but I won't bore anybody with the details of his next hospitalization and surgery for priapism.

[pyrguy]

Back in the 80's I worked in the South Louisiana oilfields on a service barge. One week we took the large cast iron pot out of the cabinets to make gumbo and found our relief crew had made seafood gumbo a week ago and put the half-full pot in the cabinet.

[CtznCane]

Only a few weeks back there started to be this horrid smell in the garage. I smelled it one day and couldn't figure it out. By the next day (and at wellover 100 degrees out there) the smell was over the top.

Our freezer is in the garage and after I buy meat/chicken I vacuum seal it and store it in the freezer. I looked on top of the freezer (an upright) and there was a bag with 2 chicken breasts that looked ready to explode. Talk about yuk! The only fortunate part is that there was only 1 more day till they picked up the garbage.

[Suzanne F]

How could I have forgotten:

when I was a kid, my mother one day "lost " a package of beef liver. Some days later, we discovered that it had slip down into the folded-up laundry cart, between the covered laundry sink and the broom closet.

(non-food): And then, the first summer HWOE and I lived in Detroit, there was this awful smell coming from the dumpster in the alley behind the house, all through a long July 4th weekend. It turned out that someone's dog had fallen out of a sixth-floor apartment window several blocks away, and ours was the first dumpster the bereaved owner found.

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