what is that horrible smell

my wife went through a phase where she was all into Clinique everything including their perfumes/colognes and she tried to get me to start wearing Happy! For Men, which basically smelled like a citrus Renuzit air freshener cone; that was horrifying

also just recently we had so much bad food shoved way in the back of our refrigerator that waves of what could be charitably described as "period smell" used to waft through our kitchen at random times until we cleaned that bad boy out

i am talking about having to confront the source of the horrible smell face to face and be like "oh...sorry"

but a catalogue of horrible smells is ok too i guess
i prefer to catalogue good smells though

xxp That reminds me of the time that I had to clear out what was practically compost from the salad draw at the bottom of the fridge, armed only with a single rubber glove with a hole in one of the fingers. Ah, shared student houses.

the fridge thing was a total "what is that terrible smell?" situation complete with forensic investigation and dawning horror at what was in the back of our fridge, likely plotting to break free in the middle of the night and murder us

once i smelled a terrible smell, and i blamed it on my elderly neighbor for a while but it turned out to be a dead mouse beside my fridge

September/kitchen/rotten potatoes

even worse than the fridge smell is when you have a stack of dirty dishes that haven't been done in days and days, and there is no apparent smell until... you lift one off and suddenly the trap of nastiness starts seeping into the air.

i kinda wish there were a smelltube.com but only for good smells
that would make me really happy, in fact

oh i have another one

went camping for the weekend, came home and smelled a terrible fermented fart smell. is it my dirty clothes? no, it is the water from the pot of beans and rice i rinsed, but neglected to wash

uuuuuuuuuuuuughhhh so gross

the actual worst worst is when you are by yourself in a room and you fart, and then you leave to get something, and then you walk back in and realize that an entire colony of dead mice is in your ass

Or if you fart in the car and the lock it up and later when you return to the car with another person and open the door, there it is, waiting for you.

Or so I've heard.

dyao another contender for the perfume of which you speak is CINNABAR by Estee Lauder. Full dIsclosure: I love that stuff and wear it occasionally but I think it smells okay on me and I know lots of people hate it.

Also maybe Clinique Aromatics Elixer.

I mean to say I know lots of people hate Cinnanar out of the bottle but like the way it smells on me. Or maybe they're just being nice and start uncontrollably retching when I leave the room.

coworkers' reheated leftovers

I walked into the front door of my house once and said aloud "what is that smell?" and it was my roommate, hiding behind the door to surprise me. That was awkward.
TBF he was once given the nickname "old pizza" (he kind of smells like that)

September/kitchen/rotten potatoes

― William (C), Friday, December 2, 2011 2:33 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

This has happened to me twice. The second time it smelled enough like vomit to cause me to bring up my lunch.

hmm next time I smell this perfume I will try to capture it in a bottle and give it to you guys irl, to confirm.

you know what's a great horrible smell? fish sauce

a variation of this:

I was talking to a college roommate one night, sitting on his bed, just about nonsense. I asked him when he had gotten brown sheets and he told me that these were the same blue ones he had at the beginning of the semester, he just never washed them

I never set foot in his room again

hahaha
oh old pizza and brown sheets now that is what i am looking for

smelled like a bunch of mice were re-enacting the 120 days of sodom behind the sink.

― dr. strongo, Friday, December 2, 2011 2:16 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

also just recently we had so much bad food shoved way in the back of our refrigerator that waves of what could be charitably described as "period smell" used to waft through our kitchen at random times until we cleaned that bad boy out

― OH NOES, Friday, December 2, 2011 2:25 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

dying at both of these

my kitchen sink smells fucked up right now. i guess i need baking soda or something?

I bought my house in 2009 from an old widow who had lived there alone for 4 years or so, but who had moved into the house in the 1940s. It had a very particular smell of dust and decomposing chemicals from the upholstery and 40 years of greasy cooking and booze and whatever.

So I'm on the commuter bus heading home yesterday and a guy sits down next to me who smells just like my house before we cleaned it up and renovated. It wasn't "horrible" like rotten potatoes but it was pretty unpleasant to be rubbing up against him on a bus seat.

iirc the sheet revelation cued me into to some sensory clues that my mind was busily deflecting in order to preserve my sanity, like how the sheets felt vaguely wax-papery and how his bedroom smelled faintly like old ham

xp: my math is somewhat off there. She got the house in the late 50s.

There's a water treatment plant a couple miles from our house which, thankfully, only smells when you are directly next to it. But sitting at the stoplight adjacent to it is pure torture, even with the windows rolled up tight and the vents shut. I've gagged many a time sitting there.

not really related but this just reminded me: i had no idea till i moved to the US that "skunk" is called that because it actually smells like a skunk... i always thought it was just because it was strong-smelling, LIKE a skunk.

― smoove operator, Friday, December 2, 2011 7:19 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

I don't understand at all. You thought that skunks were called that b/c they smelled strong like a skunk, not b/c they actually smelled the way a skunk does? I'm trying to understand but there's something I'm not getting.

Mostly I came here to say that this thread title sounds like the name of an Onion infographic, e.g., What Are We Yelling About?

I remember in high school, a bunch of us spent a week at the U of MN at a high school journalism camp where due to a mixup jjj and I were not rooming together as planned. We were in jjj's room where we'd ordered a pizza and were sitting around bullshitting and eating when jjj's roommate came in and freaked the fuck out. You would have thought we were frying durian in cat diarrhea based on his reaction, which included angry shouts of "WHAT IS THAT DISGUSTING STENCH" and "GET PERMISSION BEFORE YOU JUST BRING A PIZZA INTO SOMEONE'S ROOM, GAAAAAAAWD!" Of course we were all "um yr roommate is right here and he said it was okay, so whatever" and continued eating.

I want to say he ran out of the room and we hid the pizza box under his bed but I might be making that up.

xp: Jesse, "'skunk'" = "'mary jane'" = "'ganja'"

tbf I will probably kick somebody out of my house for bringing in the horrible stench of dominoes

Holy shit. I read a comment on FB a while back that is perfect for this thread. I have to find it!

xp- Ooooohhhh! Now I understand. Thank you.

steady larfs at my desk, keep it up

lol

IIRC it was some local campus pizza place (which may or may not have been a Dominos now that I think about it)

green peppers smell atrocious on pizza, but it's not like old canteloupe.

also the worst smelling old lady perfume from clinique is obviously YOUTH DEW

maybe that's estee lauder?

youth dew vs. creamofsumyunguy

I found it! A guy posted this comment to a friend's FB post about a stinky train car:

When we lived in the city, I was quite tired one winter morning and wearily took the dog for her morning walk. I rushed back to the apartment, got my bag, headed for the bus stop. I get on at LaSalle and Goethe. At LaSalle and Division, a homeless guy gets on and, of course, sits next to me. It is at that time I smell the strong odor of shit. FML. But, by the time we get to Oak St, the bus is packed and there is nowhere to go, so I just stay put. I get off at LaSalle & Adams, head to the office at the CBOE, the shit smell still haunting me. I get into the office, reach into my jacket pocket for my keys, and find a bag of dog shit, no doubt put there during my dog walk just 20 minutes earlier!

OH NOES otm - we don't have skunks where i come from, so i had no idea what one smelled like. i wonder how many other people are completely ignorant of this.

xp: oh god, I have a story like that

We were visiting friends in town and their condo had this awful, horrific smell in it that seemed to have no origin; everywhere we went, it was there. We thought we had tracked it down to some spots on the stairs outside their door and the husband, who was head of their condo association, typed up this long letter about cleaning up after spilling things in public spaces and taped it on the front door of the building.

After about 10 minutes of conversation we decided to leave because the smell just wouldn't go away. We walked outside and I noticed some reasonably fresh dog shit someone had neglected to pick up with a noticeable footprint in it. It jumped out at me because the footprint matched the tread on the bottom of my shoe. Basically, in our quest to find this smell that was magically following us everyone, I managed to track dog shit around their entire condo and halfway up the carpeted stairs in the common space.

Oops.

why do I have so many of these stories, clearly I am a disgusting beast

haha I was just gonna comment about how half this thread is HI DERE posts

the other half is me! i am disgusting but also have a lot of smell-related memories.

I've never had to deal with skunk spray close up, mainly just smelled it in roadkill-passing; from a distance and with brief exposure, I actually kinda like it.

i usually like skunk smell too but as i mentioned, i am disgusting.

I don't mind dead skunk smell, if dead skunk smell is what I think it is

WHAT

SKUNK SPRAY IS THE WORST FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD

gagggagaggrrgrrglaaaaaaaaaa verging on retching just thinking about the time my childhood cat tangled with a skunk, that was not good times

they don't have to be dead!

xp says the guy who wore lysol perfume

http://www.sinpets.com/dogpix/20070727Coprophagia_homebreeder_Samoyed_ToaPayohVets.jpg

Like someone else above, it smelled like we were in meth country, somewhere out in the Alpine area of San Diego or something.

lol

once in the summer the freezer in my flat somehow became unplugged, i don't know how this happens without someone moving it.

a smell had begun to rise through the flat, and when i confronted it, it was because my flatmate had a lot of fish wrapped in tinfoil in there.

i wanted to cry it smelled so bad, and almost laugh at the same time, i was screaming.

one time I entered the house during the blistering heat of the summer to an overwhelming aroma that made me nauseous and wanting to vomit.

as I got closer to my bathroom, it was enough to make me keel over. and I realized on entering what it was.

Someone, presumably from my roommate's family, had taken a shit, clogged the toilet and let it sit for 9-10 hours. I was so fucking pissed. had to plunge it while holding my nose and trying not to throw up.

also the scent that emanates from really spoiled food? last house. roommate had fucking mayonaise from 2010 in there....all kinds of shit past expiry. it was like he just had no clue.

just spilled half a litre of milk onto the floor of my car fuck fuck fuck

Lucky it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

when you have the heat on and the windows up

How did you spill milk all over the inside of your car? Hydraulics acting up again?

there was a horrible smell in the grocery store yesterday and i think it was because they'd set up a propane bbq (for free samples of some sort) and something was amiss. five minutes after i walked by, i went by again and it was gone. half the store smelled so weird, the kind of smell that is bad yet hard to place, so i was both trying not to breathe deeply and yet trying to figure out what the horrible smell was and so, breathing deeper. eesh.

xp Actually I remember when the windscreen on my old car leaked and rainwater got in, pooling in the passenger side footwell, and that stunk bad enough. I can't (or at least don't want to) imagine how bad milk would stink up a car.

way to humour a deems jeez

the only logical thing to do is to find something even smellier to mask the milk smell

Just don't wash, like, ever again.

Also, put used burger wrappers all over the floor of the car to soak up the milk.

one (1) full tin of baking soda brushed in through the carpet, have to vacuum in the morning. fingers crossed

i sold a car before because i spilled milk in it. shit is the worst

Stop drinking milk in the car.

i was transporting it from the shop this time tbf

the last one, yeah ok fair enough

There was an episode of Car Talk from a while back in which a guy called in to ask how to get rid of the smell of rancid butter that had melted into the heating ducts in his car. It was pretty funny.

!!! haha wtf

lol car talk gets bad smell q's all the time. iirc the answer is to take it to a body shop.

there was one where a guy's buddies pranked him by hiding a fish in the vents or something

Maybe advice for d - http://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/features/fido/zeolite.html or http://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/features/fido/ozone.html

ta!

No smell as yet i've the soda left on it and will hoover tonight before checking status

why are you putting coke on it? gross

simpsons

all i'm sayin

simpsons

The odor that you may smell on the 9th floor is due to an oil delivery to the building early this morning. I have spoken to the building security and they have checked our floor and now that the ventilators are running – the odor should be eliminated shortly.

If you have any problems, please see me at once.

parents are boiling seaweed again