Monday, July 1, 2013

What Died?

Last Monday, as I headed home from work, something smelled a little bit "off" in my car.  I couldn't quite place it.  I looked around to see if a kid had left something in there (food, etc) and couldn't find anything.  Once on the road, I could no longer smell it, so I forgot all about it.

Tuesday morning, I was a bit stronger, but I didn't have time to investigate, so I came on to work, forgetting about it along the way, again.  After work, I went out to my car and the smell hit me before I got to the door.  Getting in the car proved nauseating.  It smelled like a dead body.

When I got home, I looked all around in there again and couldn't find anything.  I went back and popped the trunk and was almost flattened as the smell hit me in the face in the 95° heat.  There, in the back, was the milk that I had purchased on Monday morning.  It apparently never got taken into the house.

Except that it was no longer milk.  It was 1/3 full of a chunky substance with a brown color.  The entire carpet in my trunk was moist with the wretched nastiness.  I drove to work and back on Wednesday wishing that my sense of smell didn't work.  A coworker and I started some online research for ideas to help.

That night, I sprinkled a full 1 pound can of coffee back there.  The next day, it smelled like coffee grounds and death.  Slightly more like coffee, but the hint of death was still there.  Yesterday, Natalie vacuumed the coffee out and found an area that had allowed the liquid to pool.  Kevin got rid of that, and today I put an air freshener in the front of my car.  As of tonight, the death smell is gone.

Let's just hope it doesn't come back.  ::shudder::

1 comment:

Jon said...

Well, at least it was only milk and not something dead (although spoiled milk can smell as rotten as death.....)

The exact same thing happened to me about a year ago. I accidentally left a gallon of milk in the back of my car for three days. Fortunately the weather wasn't very hot and the milk didn't smell too bad.