O-yah... Onions can be pretty bad too..
Hey, but if you want to know what takes the cake...
it's gotta be dead rats..yessir..
Like, I mean a nest of dead ones...
About 5 years ago,
I was working in a car dealership parts department,
and they started having a problem with rats out in the garage.
So, one of our resident Rocket Scientists
got the bright idea of putting a bunch
of rat bait around the place...
you know.. Knock 'em all dead in a couple of days.
Well, I guess it DID knock 'em dead PDQ,
but then about...oh... 7 - 10 days later,
it started smelling REAL BAD in the part of the
parts department where a staircase ran next
to the insulated outer wall of the building....
Now, we are NOT talking about some poofy bad smell..
No sir.
We are talking about out-and-out mind-numbing,
nose-insulting, nauseating, horrific odor...
It was almost IMPOSSIBLE
to run up or down the staircase
near that smell..
Un-frigging-real.
Well, there was NO QUESTION whatsoever,
of ripping the wall apart to get at the
nest of rotting rats...
We're talking industrial steel building
with walls all bolted in place
and foil-backed sheets of foam insulation
filling all the walls,
with pre-fabricated steel stairs and mezzanines
bolted to the whole shooting match.
So, basically, we're actually talking about a
"like-it-or-lump-it" situation.
Well, I have to tell you that we were NOT happy
about working near that smell at all.
Nope.
But, you see, we had HIGH HOPES that the odor would
eventually subside
as several know-it-all gurus around the place...
mostly car salesmen and the odd mechanic,
kept telling us that the rats would eventually
DRY UP
and
STOP SMELLING.
HAha ha ha ha haha hahHAAAAAAA
Got NEWS for ya..
NO WAY, JOSE!!!
Those dead rats continued to smell all spring,
and when summer came
and the HOT SUN started beating down on that
SOUTH FACING WALL...
Well, Mister,... I can tell you that things got pretty
HOSTILE
around the old parts department... yessirree...
Well, just about the time that the situation was becoming
TOTALLY UNBEARABLE
and a couple of us were thinking of just not coming to work anymore,
we got this.... uhm..... BRAINSTORM for a way
to get RID of the smell of the rotting rats, once and for all.
You see... in the "automotive industry",
we make use of what might be classed as
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH ODOR-EATER FORMULAS...
Yep.
Special products designed to KNOCK OUT
bad smells in cars... especially heating ducts
in used cars...
Like, say, for instance,
that you get a used car in
and the dude that owned it before was an avid
CIGAR SMOKER... or maybe he was a veterinarian..
E-gads!! Some of those farm vet's
used SUV's come in off lease or for trade-in
with the most OBNOXIOUS smells imbedded right into
the seats and carpets and headliners...
Yeah... kind of an immensely powerful mixture of
disinfectants, medical supply smells, manure and
a je-ne-sais-quoi smell of pathology specimens
in-transit to the veterinary lab for analysis..
(I could be more specific about the nature of
the specimens, but...well... there are probably
a couple of city-folk that might read this thread
and I don't want to be responsible for any
lost dinners tonight, thank you most kindly).
Anyhow, well, Yep,
Vee haff ways off deeling vit such odors...
uh-huh...
You see, we have these SPRAY BOMBS of
INSTANT ODOR that we can spray into the air ducts
of the used cars to OVER-RIDE the
indigenous obnoxious odors.
Trouble is, you have to be kind of CAREFUL
with such products as they are, indeed,
rather obnoxious in their own right.
Well, after some contemplation, a couple of us
came to an executive decision about how to deal
with the rotting rat nest smell.
Seems nobody was going to come to the rescue
and tear the wall apart to remove the rats,
so we decided to make a small incision in the insulation,
right around the spot where the smell seemed to be
exuding to the highest level on our Smell-O-Meters...
(in actual fact, our Smell-O-Meters were kind of
over-the-top into over-kill territory...)
So, well... we had to flip a coin over who would
have the DELIGHTFUL JOB
of cutting the hole in the insulation with an exacto knife
and then spraying INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH ODOR-EATER SPRAY
into the incision...
Unfortunately, as luck would have it....
......
I lost the toss of the coin.
Somewhat reluctantly,
I armed myself with an exacto knife and a spray bomb
and edged up the stairs to the pre-determined spot
where the incision was to be made.
Slashing the foil skin of the insulation,
I was INSTANTLY HORRIFIED to find myself in the MIDST
of a blast of stench that would just about
melt the eyebrows off of a camel...
Man-o-man-o-man... It was....
ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL
But HELL!!! I'm no WUSS!!!
So I quickly grabbed the spray bomb
and started discharging it into the incision...
JUST BLASTING IT!!!!
Now, you're only supposed to blast about
3-5 seconds of this stuff into a whole frigging
reeking car air duct system...
but we had reckoned that this was NO ORDINARY REEK...
Nope.
This one would require a good 15 seconds of blasting...
So I held tough... and blasted away.....
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15...
But THEN!!!
Like... all of a sudden,
it struck me..
I mean... the SMELL of the spray bomb struck me!!!
YAH!!!!!
It was TERRIBLE!!!!
You see... seems that in amongst the whole CASE LOAD
of CITRUS SCENTED INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH ODOR-EATER SPRAY BOMBS
there had accidentally been secreted
one... I said... ONE
can of IMITATION BABY POWDER FRAGRANCE spray bomb!!!!
Well, I probably don't have to tell you
what a 15-second POWER BLAST of
IMITATION BABY POWDER FRAGRANCE
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH ODOR-EATER SPRAY BOMB smells like,
or do I?????
Let's just say that,
if you wrapped up all of the smell of
freshly-powdererd babies from maybe ALL of
California and let's throw in Oregon and Washington State to boot...
well... that MIGHT come up to about 30 percent
of the smell of the blast of spray that I had
INJECTED into the reeking chamber of rotting rats...
Yessir..
It was MEAN, I tell you...
...and I was HORRIFIED!!!!!!
I have to admit that I was suddenly repentant about
what I had done...
suddenly realizing that the natural smell of
rotting rats was less than ONE QUARTER as BAD
as the smell of 15 seconds of IMITATION BABY POWDER SPRAY...
It was sad... sad, I tell you..
We... my partner on the mechanic's counter...and I...
Had to ENDURE several months of the most
REVOLTING IMAGINABLE COMBINATION ODOR
or reeking rotting rats mixed with over-powering baby powder smell...
It was SHEAR TORTURE...
The immensity of the TORTURE is probably beyond
even YOUR wildest dreams, my friend..
Yes indeed... it surely was....
So...well... eventually...
I did what any self-respecting parts man would do...
Yep... You got that right, Pontiac...
I QUIT!!!
(o:
-croc |
