Pardon the deviation from commentary on political economy, but I have to tell this story – perhaps as a form of catharsis.
As regular readers know, I got back from Europe Thursday afternoon. When I got to my house, I noticed a very unpleasant smell. Given that there was a cat box that hadn’t been changed in 11 days, that wasn’t too much of a surprise, but the smell was beyond that.
Something was rotting. My first instinct was to blame the cats. It is not uncommon for me to smell something terrible and then find a dead mouse or bird that one of the cats dragged into the house. This was a very strong odor, so I was worried that something large – like a rabbit or squirrel, was decomposing under a sofa someplace.
I checked the usual places, but couldn’t find anything. So I shrugged my shoulders and went to sleep.
The next day, Friday, I went to work and stayed late catching up on things that built up during my absence. I came home, noticed the smell again, but couldn’t find anything and went to bed.
I woke up today, greeted by the same foul smell and was beginning to think I would have to take the house apart. But my first order of business was to mow the lawn and handle some other yard work. So I mowed and then decided to open the garage to get some weed killer.
Big mistake.
The odor hit me like a freight train, followed by an awareness of hundreds of flies buzzing around, and then followed by the horrifying realization that the freezer door was open.
Nothing I write can capture the scene that greeted me, but let your imagination contemplate the combination of a full freezer and nearly two weeks of warm weather. I won’t provide too many gross details, but I will say that if maggots were worth anything, I’d be a rich man today.
So I spent over one hour pulling various disgusting and putrid things out of the freezer, breathing only with my mouth, and trying not to recycle my lunch. Tomorrow, I’ll have to sop up a disgusting brown liquid that has accumulated in the bottom of the freezer. Oh, and to add insult to injury, garbage pickup isn’t until Tuesday, so the smell won’t go away anytime soon (and it will probably linger even after then).
I’ve had some unpleasant experiences in my life, including the discovery of no toilet paper (or paper towels, or anything) after making an emergency bathroom visit in Romania. Nothing, though, comes remotely close to the nightmare I endured today.
Hmmm… maybe you should have just shut the freezer door, wrote it off as a total loss, and hauled it to the dump.
Are you OK? If you live alone, and no one is there to keep up the maintenance, maybe its time to move to an luxury condo. A home that has no one living there is not a home.
Ooooh, Dan! That’s horrid. I’m so sorry!
If you want commiseration, ask Oleg about his fridge incident in October 2008! It involved a rotting fridge, lots of fly paper, and one cat that had to be dipped in orange cleaner!
Dan, I am “so sorry.” What a babylon.
Dan,
Sorry to hear, Dan. Next time ask one of your friends (no names) to eat his way through your freezer.
I can actually one-up you. Summer 1986, Uppsala, Sweden. It’s been an unusually warm August and students are returning to the university at the end of the month. At one of the student social clubs (like big fraternities) they start to re-open the restaurant. It’s been closed all summer so the odd smell in the kitchen is nothing anyone worries about. I frequented their bar a lot at that time – they had a nice assortment of beer and made good burgers – and heard the conversations about the odd smell that persisted in the kitchen. As the smell got worse and they had not found the reason they called in all kinds of people to help them. No one found the source, and the smell only got worse.
After three weeks someone came up with the idea to check the chimney for dead birds. They found something dead, alright, but it was not a bird… and the decomposition had been going on for about seven weeks at that time.
Sorry about your experience… and financial loss.
We had the same thing happen when we were gone for two weeks. We had hired a 15 yr old neighbor boy to feed our dog and cats and check on the house, take in the mail etc. (We had a supply pipe leak under a sink on a previous vacation and didn’t want to come home to an emergency like that again.)
We double checked our freezer before we left, but the boy’s curiosity must have got the best of him. When we got home our upright freezer was ajar and well you know the rest… except that it was an up right sitting in a laundry room with indoor out door carpeting. Blood and “living crawlies” were everywhere, under the washer and dryer too.
How he left it like that and didn’t tell his mom, (or us when we called,) amazed me. And someone had turned the heater all the way up on our tropical fish tank. Our guess was he sent in his 10 yr old brother to do the job for him.
Between my Blue Ribbon steaks, my tropical fish, and the carpet, it was a major financial loss. I was just glad the motor on the freezer didn’t burn up too.
I had to spray everything with bug killer and Lysol, open the window, put a fan in it facing outward, wait until the smell subsided a little and most of the “wiggling” stopped.
I was glad that I had my husband to help with the mess. We wore rubber gloves and I held open the doubled trash bags while keeping my eyes closed and holding my breath as much as possible. I don’t think I could have done it all without him there for moral support. What a nightmare!
I am sorry you went through it alone. I hope it doesn’t take you long to get the site and smell out of your mind, or cause you bad dreams.
Well, if this is truly the worst experience in your life then consider yourself blessed. It’s all smooth sailing from here!
[...] the error must somehow be a Freudian slip) into slave labor. They got to sop up the toxic mess left in the freezer and then empty the freezer and the trash bags full of rotting food and maggots at the dump. But as [...]