Rotten Office Fridge Cleanup Sends 7 To Hospital

bokske writes "An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill. Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday, after the flagrant fumes prompted someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in. Just another day at the office."

Comments

Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

It's one thing if spores cause an infection- but going to the hospital cause you don't like a smell? I mean come on. Grow a pair, you know?

Bring on the comments about how so-and-so knows somebody's grandma that was so affected by smell xyz that something bad happened. Big whoop. Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.

And please, just because you don't have a sense of smell, doesn't mean you're immune to pathogens.

So much wrong.. must resist reference to idle section... oops too late!

Re:Paaaleeese

[antifoidulus]

It wasn't really the smell per se, it was the mixture of rotting food and harsh cleaning chemicals that caused a lot of the people to vomit. The warning labels on those things are pretty lengthy.

Re:Paaaleeese

[ShadowBlasko]

There are quite a few molds and other items that can cause serious respiratory distress for those of us allergic to them. Fast acting too. When I got off the plane in Australia and was exposed to new pollens I my body had never experienced, I was horizontal on a gurney getting anti-histamine treatments within 30 minutes!

Re:Paaaleeese

[Spazmania]

It's one thing if spores cause an infection- but going to the hospital cause you don't like a smell? I mean come on. Grow a pair, you know?

RTFA. The fridge was full of mold. Many folks are allergic to mold, especially in quantity.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Red Flayer]

Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.

What do you think odors are? They are chemicals.

If chemicals induce vomiting, they are affecting your health... repeated vomiting can have some nasty effects (like difficulties breathing due to rib muscle injury, or major capillary damage that can affect eyesight, or aspiration of stomach contents leading to pulmonary infection).

Never mind potential allergic reactions.

And never mind the affects of concentrated cleaning solvents in poorly-ventilated areas, which seems also to have been part of the problem.

Oops. Fed the troll.

Re:Paaaleeese

[LocutusMIT]

That's really interesting. I have the opposite reaction— my immune system doesn't recognise new pollens until I've been exposed to them for about a year. Living abroad was heaven.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Andy Dodd]

Some forms of mold can be toxic even to those not specifically allergic to mold.

A friend of mine and his wife got quite sick after cleaning out her brother's fridge, and he still has some lingering health effects from the mold exposure.

Re:Paaaleeese

[bsdaemonaut]

Wow, your wrong in so many ways. People die from huffing every day. Inhaling fumes whether it's a gas resulting from chemicals, rotting food, or human excrement does not have favorable outcomes.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Chabo]

If chemicals induce vomiting, they are affecting your health... repeated vomiting can have some nasty effects (like difficulties breathing due to rib muscle injury, or major capillary damage that can affect eyesight, or aspiration of stomach contents leading to pulmonary infection).

Don't forget vocal chord rupture. James Labrie of Dream Theater had this happen after eating in Cuba and getting food poisoning. Ten years later, he was fully recovered. In the meantime, he had nowhere near the vocal range that he used to. (parodied in the James Labrie Action Figure commercial)

Re:Paaaleeese

[dfm3]

TFA says that several cleaners were used, and the video mentions some sort of spray cleanser. Know what happens when you mix cleaners? The result isn't pretty. Fumes of toxic compounds such as chlorine, Chloramine, or even hydrazine can be produced. I once personally saw a building that had to be evacuated because somebody mixed bleach and ammonia when cleaning a restroom.

While TFA doesn't explicitly state whether this happened or not, it isn't that much of a stretch.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

Since nobody read my comment, I'll reiterate-

Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.

Now, from TFA:

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment - she can't smell because of allergies.

I don't think a lack of the sense of smell makes you immuned. They were grossed out by a harmless smell, apparently. RTFA.

Re:Paaaleeese

[drinkypoo]

It's one thing if spores cause an infection- but going to the hospital cause you don't like a smell? I mean come on. Grow a pair, you know?

I read an article about this before it appeared here. The problem wasn't the smell, it was that the woman used two incompatible cleaning chemicals and created some kind of magical gas that can kill people. You know, kind of like mixing ammonia and chlorine bleach? But this wasn't as bad as that.

The linked article says the following:

[...] while using two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess. The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

But a superior article came out today:

The woman, who was suffering from a sinus problem and couldn't smell the chemical, then used a second solution, Stallard said. The two chemicals interacted in the air, adding to an already pungent odor caused by the rotten food.

"Discarding the food isn't so critical, but more critical is the cleaning chemical, making sure you know what you're using," Stallard said. "Don't combine chemicals - you're never supposed to combine chemicals."

See, it's not the smell, it's the chemical. When I went to interview for a job with Mendocino County, there was a very nice pamphlet with citations by the same title. (It appears on this Mendo Mental Health Board agenda as a footnote... I have contacted MCWOW to see if I can get my hands on a PDF) But the simple truth is that chemicals even from different perfumes can combine into potentially hazardous compounds — the added scents from the two cleaners could well have combined into something genuinely toxic. Generally speaking, the nausea from simply smelling something disgusting is extremely transient.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

Since you didn't read my comment, I'll direct you to this: comment.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

Losing your sense of smell doesn't make you immuned to these chemicals. The article clearly outlines the fact that it was just a gross smell, nothing more- http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1231883&cid=27941825

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

TFA that's linked on slashdot mentions her lack of smell was the reason she wasn't hospitalized. Sounds to me like it was just a gross smell- not a dangerous smell.

Re:Paaaleeese

[MyLongNickName]

Untrue. The article explicitly states that the person cleaning the fridge was not affected (effected?) due to allergies which prevent her from smelling. Allergies do not give you superhuman resistance to chlorine gas.

Re:Paaaleeese

[tiny1877]

'Affected' is correct. Affect = Verb Effect = Noun

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

You've got to be the only person here who read the article.. I picked up on that, and I'm flamebait for picking on people who don't like gross smells. If there was a truely harmful chemical or spore in the air, she would've been affected too. Thanks everybody. Not only didn't you RTFA, but you didn't RTFC either.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

However, huffing them, and not smelling them, makes you immuned? I suggest you RTFA.

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1231883&cid=27941825

Re:Paaaleeese

[Shin-LaC]

In deadly Australia, even the plants are out to get you.

Re:Paaaleeese

[__aaclcg7560]

You, sir, have never been exposed to leftover take out Chinese food that sat in a wastebasket during a hot summer weekend. The smell was bad enough to knock zombies over dead.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Shin-LaC]

Indeed, molds are nothing to scoff at. Mark Tatum lost half his face to a toxic mold infection.

Re:Paaaleeese

[giorgiofr]

Effect can be a verb too. It means to produce, to bring into existence.

Re:Paaaleeese

[rackserverdeals]

OK, you have to fill me in. What's with the shovel? I haven't followed the band in a while. Did some searching and didn't find anything.

Not even in wikipedia but I did learn he sang backup for Life in Still Water which was one of my favorite songs to play.

Got a link to the digging story?

Re:Paaaleeese

[Z00L00K]

The smell of rotten food is known to induce vomiting, and that's a reaction from the body to avoid food poisoning.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

But if you've got a strong stomach, you can handle it (I'm assuming that's how coroner do it...). My point is this- it wasn't dangerous, it was just a nasty smell.

Re:Paaaleeese

[innocent_white_lamb]

The worst smell I've ever encountered: In a former life, I used to be a sheriff. One day I went to impound an old station wagon -- I could smell it from many feet away. I broke a window on the side of the car with the intent of seeing what's what, and immediately vomited on the street and ran away as fast as I could. I called the fire department to come with their Scott air packs to hook up the car and tow it to furthest back corner of the impound yard. After getting it to the impound yard, we examined it and discovered a liquified goo in a couple of large garbage bags in the back of the station wagon. The goo also contained small bones. We sampled it and sent the goo to the crime lab, thinking that it was parts of a rotted-away body. It turned out to be the remains of a large dog.

Nobody could go near that car without breathing apparatus. The smell apparently wouldn't kill you (I'm still here) but it sure did make me sick.

Re:Paaaleeese

[drinkypoo]

TFA that's linked on slashdot mentions her lack of smell was the reason she wasn't hospitalized.

TFA that's linked on slashdot says that her inability to use her sinus passages was the reason she wasn't hospitalized. There is a subtle but significant difference.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Volante3192]

Smell alone can cause violent reactions. While I was in the kitchen one time, for some reason the smell of the cut tomatoes got to me and I started getting very ill.

The tomatoes were perfectly fine, there was nothing toxic in the air, but the tomato smell was just so incredibly overpowering I was a hair's width away from puking.

Re:Paaaleeese

[shogun]

But the simple truth is that chemicals even from different perfumes can combine into potentially hazardous compounds

We already learnt that one from The Joker...

Re:Paaaleeese

[digital bath]

that makes me want to curl up into a little ball and cry for the rest of the day. thanks

Re:Paaaleeese

[Red Flayer]

I read your comment.

I also read TFA, and TFS.

Why can't someone smell when they have seasonal allergies? If you can figure out the answer to THAT question, then you can figure out why inhalation of chemicals into her nasal passage was not a problem, and why concerns about a vomitous reaction would not be a concern for her.

Though toxins with effects other than causing (involuntary, btw) gag reflex appear not to be an issue in this case, the people who succumbed to the odors *had no way of knowing that*.

In short, you're still way off base.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Chabo]

I didn't know what it was either, so I looked through the YouTube comments on the video (I linked to the higher-quality version), and I found the answer:

"James disappears from the stage for long periods of time during extended solo parts...the running joke among DT nerds is that he digs a massive hole during instrumental breaks"

So that answers that... :)

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that the real lesson from all of this is "Don't clean"?

Re:Paaaleeese

[MyLongNickName]

I think there is a difference between "the smell of the diaper made me hurl" to "the smell caused me to go to the hospital". Maybe I am wrong, but I would tend to think some folks might have overreacted a bit to the stench. Sounds to me like one person became ill, and then the programmed herd instinct took over. Then, the cynical side of me wonders how many folks wanted a day off of work.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

No, TFA linked says it was her inability to smell.

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment â" she can't smell because of allergies.

Re:Paaaleeese

[mrbene]

"Affected" is correct in the text provided by MyLongNickName, so the statement by Tiny1877 is at least partially correct.

Tiny1877 is also correct for general usage - when you visited the dictionary, you would have found the first few entries of "Affect" treating it as a verb, whereas the first few entries of "Effect" would have referenced usage as a noun.

Oh, maybe I should have thrown in a sensational start to this post, to increase my chance of being noticed...

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

No, I'm right on target. I said that it was a bad odor that made people feel sick, and I implied they should buck up. Not saying that's easy, but unless there was a poisonous reaction, or spores or something, no need to hospitalize.

The fact that she couldn't smell was precisely why she wasn't affected. Whereas an actual chemical poison or airborne pathogen would be dangerous with or without the use of her nose.

I throw up on roller coasters, I can't help it. But no need to go to the hospital.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

That's what I'm saying. Buck up! It's just a smell. Some people work around bad smells, they learn to live with it.

Unfortunately, I am now officially this thread's troll.

Re:Paaaleeese

[InlawBiker]

The fungus took my baby!

Re:Paaaleeese

[rackserverdeals]

You didn't watch the video in the link. It had more information than the linked article, as did other articles.

"Someone also took some spray and tried to deodorize the air and it turned out it was a spot cleaner not a deodorant and it made peope very sick, " says Capt. Barry Stallard of the San Jose fire department.

She might not have been in the area where the spot cleaner was sprayed.

Re:Paaaleeese

[HTH NE1]

Or the mucus due to her allergies acted as a filter preventing her from inhaling the toxic elements.

Because that's one of your nasal mucus' jobs: to stop you from breathing in any more of the stuff that's causing you to produce mucus (usually by trapping and isolating it). And no, mouth-breathing does not totally bypass this function as anyone who has gagged on their own mucus can attest.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Intron]

Ob. link

Re:Paaaleeese

[nordah]

Some people work around bad smells, they learn to live with it.

Some people work around flashing light patterns. Others get epileptic seizures from electric rodents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon

Re:Paaaleeese

[bev_tech_rob]

I noticed that too about the person who was cleaning the fridge (couldn't smell), so that ruled out possible chlorine gas (possibly mixing bleach & ammonia cleaner)....must have been NASTY!!

Re:Paaaleeese

[Dishevel]

Are you just posting cause you feel like it. Because if you had the slightest clue as to what you were talking about you would not have posted that. Chlorine gas is deadly. Not deadly if you are allergic to it or deadly if you are a puss. DEADLY. Used as a weapon in war. Deadly.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Znork]

You can handle it most of the time, and to a certain extent.

I spent a year working in a lab where one of my duties was preparing fluid extracts from drilled core samples of landfills for analysis. Most of the time it was just a nasty smell, and work was done under a fume hood, so it wasn't that bad.

But one or two times the core drilling had really hit jackpot; the slightest whiff out of the fume hood and breakfast was coming up. None of the usual 'eww, ick, blech, that really stinks', just the sensation of something hitting the olfactory sense followed by immediate backwards rerun of the last meal, then wondering what the hell just happened. And then continuing further work without breathing through the nose (or, preferably, breathing elsewhere in the room and holding my breath while working with the samples).

Of course, as I knew pretty much what I was working with and knew there was no significant exposure anyway there was no need to seek medical attention. But if they managed to strike similar gold in the realm of olfactory adventures, I can certainly understand that they may be a bit shaken. In combination with an uncertainty about the cleaning chemicals a visit to the doctor might not be entirely uncalled for.

With some nauseating fumes toughing it out simply isn't an option, they trigger some form of autonomous immediate purge signal. Considering the number of vomiting agents that have been developed as non-lethal weapons, it's not that surprising if random decomposition biochemistry happens to brew us one of its own every now and then.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Dishevel]

Smells like that can be horrible and even completely unapproachable without equipment. Still no matter how bad the smell is, it will not kill.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Gilmoure]

A bebbee et mah dingo!

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words you don't have clue what happened, assumed they were whimps and went to the hospital because no chemicals were causing any type of physical reaction and you an ass.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Hurricane78]

Well, they should get a free training day as a digestion tower diver from their boss.

If I were their boss, I'd totally do it. :D

And: Yes, that is an actual job! You wear scuba gear, and jump into a 40C hot pool of shit, pee, an other "enzymes" and stuff. I think you have to have a dead nose and no wife to do that job. ^^

Re:Paaaleeese

[bellers]

RTFA: It was in San Jose. Many folks in California are retarded pussies, especially in large cities.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Then there's the people who puke when they smell puke. I would think this funny but my son puked while walking into a store, so we do the responsible thing and make sure the store knows the mess is there. The person who goes to clean it up then pukes so we stand there for like 10 minutes while another employee is found that can handle the smell.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Critical Facilities]

I have 2 comparable, horrible life experiences:

1. I used to work in residential property management. We had a "skip", where someone behind on their rent just moves out in the middle of the night and you have no idea they're gone until you show up with the Sheriff to boot them out/change the locks. Upon entering this one apartment, it was obvious the power had been off for quite a while. Yours truly was the lucky guy to open the fridge. Not only was it full of food, but in the freezer was what used to be at least a 15 lb turkey. Needless to say, it was more than aromatic. After several attempts to fumigate/disinfect/deodorize, we had to dispose of the fridge altogether and buy a new one.

2. The worst one was, in my early 20's my roommate (at the time) and I lived in a rather seedy section of town in a cheap apartment. The laundry room at the bottom of our common hallway flooded and mildewed the carpets, which began to smell pretty bad. After the smells got unusually overwhelming and after many many many complaints, management entered the unit down one floor and across the hall from our place (the one we walked past to get into our place every night). Turns out our neighbor had been stabbed, and died while trying to crawl for his front door. His body was literally melting into the carpet on the other side of the door. My poor roommate happened to be walking by the door while the homicide cops were there. The body had been removed, but he later said that it looked like someone had dropped a Jello mold on the carpet. **shudder** I will never forget that smell.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Red Flayer]

Perhaps you don't understand the nature of vomiting issue. "Bucking up" because it's a "bad smell" is not always possible. Good for you if you're an internet tough guy who never vomits unless he chooses to. The rest of the population sometimes simply doesn't have a choice in the matter. The vomit reflex in response to smell is NOT a voluntary response. While it sometimes can be limited via voluntary effort, this is not always the case.

It is human nature to vomit at the smell of noxious fumes (that's why they are called noxious); this is a biological trait that has evolved as a survival response to eating tainted food.

I don't know if you've ever had a bout of violent vomiting that lasted several minutes. Pulled rib muscles, capillary damage resulting in bleeding from nasal passages and the eyes, esophageal bleeding... a couple of these items require medical examination. When I was an EMT, we had a guy who was throwing up due to overeating and not chewing his food properly, and he had a heart attack, likely from the increase in blood pressure/pulse rate while vomiting. He had no idea he was having a heart attack, he thought he just had painful vomiting.

If there is an unknown risk (which is quite possible), seeking medical evaluation is important. Both for liability reasons (you KNOW the employer needs to cover their ass) and for humane reasons. What if there was a bigger issue, such as toxins? Are you medically qualified to rule that out? Do you think anyone in that office was?

And I'll give you a little hint about office morale... having several employees puking their guts out is a bad idea. Sending them directly home is callous. Making sure they are OK is the right thing to do, and medical evaluation is the right way to do it.

Re:Paaaleeese

[shermo]

How on earth is this "troll"?

Re:Paaaleeese

[mikael]

A friend once left a open bag of spicy rice at the back of a deep cupboard over three months. After about three months he couldn't understand why that particular area of the kitchen always seem to hit him with a wave of hot air. That was just a small bag of rice. I would hate to imagine what decomposed vegetation would smell combined with that - most vegetables decompose into a vinegary/soapy smell.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Volante3192]

Mocking medical conditions isn't really a good way to endear yourself.

Further, these people weren't exactly garbage men, plumbers or others who have to expect green haze during the daily grind. This is cube farm work. These people didn't expect to be drenched in the foul odor of Beelzebub's flatulence when they clocked in.

Finally, when you get a call about an office keeling over from smells, are you going to (a) figure out what happened or (b) make sure the people are all right? I'm not the most humanitarian person but I'm going to pick (b) and err on the side of caution.

The one cleaning had allergies and wasn't affected. Good. But maybe she just has a poor sense of smell through genetics? Some people can't taste broken aspirin. Others...can.

Re:Paaaleeese

[ebuck]

Losing your sense of smell doesn't make you immune, that's true; however, it's not a hard stretch of the imagination for this person to have panicked and left the scene. After word of mouth eventually directs the questioning individuals back to the cleaner, I'd imagine that the age old "I didn't think it was a big deal; because, it didn't affect me." would be the predicted response.

The article is so light on the details, that you don't get a good picture of what really happened.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Effect = Noun

Not always!

"Barack Obama sought the office of President of the United States of America because of his deep desire to effect change in Washington."

Grammatically correct, yet factually wrong. He wanted to "effect change" in his wallet. And in his KFC bucket.

Oops, too soon? Sorry.

Re:Paaaleeese

[emc]

I would think this funny but my son puked while walking into a store, so we do the responsible thing and make sure the store knows the mess is there.

Wouldn't the responsible thing have been to clean it yourself?

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, chlorine gas is deadly to all. It has nothing to do with health or allergies.

Re:Paaaleeese

[bitchzilla]

Maybe if someone cleaned the fridge more than once a year this could have been avoided. And who would put good food you plan to eat in a disgusting fridge that this.

Re:Paaaleeese

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

When someone has a valid point, Mr Fredrickson stops replying. Still, not wasted time - interesting info.

Re:Paaaleeese

[sortius_nod]

Agreed... As we say here in Australia:

Harden the fuck up!

Re:Paaaleeese

[sjames]

Sufficiently bad smells can provoke instant and repeated vomiting in many people. It's not even unheard of for particularly nasty smells to cause a brief loss of consciousness (though it's more common when a construction worker ruptures an active sewer pipe).

Follow that with painful dry heaves, elevated heart rate (from the pain and abdominal contractions), low blood pressure (carryover from the minor shock like reaction) and paramedics who cannot 100% rule out something worse than a bad smell and they will recommend a hospital visit just to be on the safe side. Some people will insist they'll be OK, others will be reluctant to ignore a paramedic's advice.

Re:Paaaleeese

[sjames]

Others pointed out that there are mold toxins that only SOME people have a serious acute reaction to. Perhaps the woman cleaning the fridge was not one of those people but the 7 who went to the hospital were.

Send 2 people into a factory that makes peanut butter. One might die on the spot and the other just gets hungry (well, if not for someone dying next to them).

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, much the same as the rest of America then.

Re:Paaaleeese

[poached]

one of our neighbors in the apartment died of natural causes and the police were called after complients

Re:Paaaleeese

[spun]

Clean it with what? You may carry cleaning supplies with you everywhere, but most people don't. And a store could not lend you cleaning supplies and let you clean the premises, for liability reasons. I mean, 'Yay!' for personal responsibility and all, but think things through before you criticize others.

Re:Paaaleeese

[The_mad_linguist]

Are you just posting cause you feel like it. Because if you had the slightest clue as to what you were talking about you would not have posted that. Chlorine gas is deadly. Not deadly if you are allergic to it or deadly if you are a puss. DEADLY. Used as a weapon in war. Deadly.

The dose makes the poison - Paracelsus

Re:Paaaleeese

[a09bdb811a]

The fungus took my baby!

Are you actually old enough to remember that story, or are you just regurgitating what you've heard somewhere?

It always amazes me how popular that reference is. Most recently I heard it in the movie "Tropic Thunder".

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Pffsss... More likely someone simply left an opened can of surstromming.

Re:Paaaleeese

[cstacy]

When I was an EMT, we had a guy who was throwing up due to overeating and not chewing his food properly, and he had a heart attack, likely from the increase in blood pressure/pulse rate while vomiting.

He shouldn't have eaten that last, one, small, wafer.

Re:Paaaleeese

[nametaken]

The video says they tried to use spot cleaner thinking it was air freshener and then everyone got sick.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never try to reduce a natural language to a small set of logical rules."

Agreed. Their are a hole bunch of reasons that people should bee able to disregard the rules of syntax because they're are many ways in witch one thing could be expressed.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a reason to sue which would turn that day off into comfortable retirement...

Re:Paaaleeese

[bsdaemonaut]

I suggest you RTFA. One person.. I repeat, ONE PERSON, who had allergies, was unaffected. I suggest you read up on mucus membranes (like your nose and lungs) -- they tend to be impaired when histamine reactions cause prodigious amounts of snot. Seriously, put two and two together.

Re:Paaaleeese

[sik0fewl]

Hey, either way you should give him a break. At least he actually quoted it right... well, except the fungus part.

Re:Paaaleeese

[slashtivus]

I have a story related to #1.

Last place I lived had one of those old *non* frost-free refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom. It didn't have the greatest seal either. I got so frustrated with it that I just duct-taped it closed and got a separate freezer to use instead.

. I had forgotten about the 15 lb turkey in there. Well, about 3 years later it finally bit the dust and the landlord had to replace it. It was placed at the back of the property by the trash / recycling area.
Everyone kept wondering what that smell was out there for most of the summer. For whatever reason that fall the freezer got opened. There was an empty bag of bones left in the freezer. Apparently the insects had eaten well that summer.

Glad I never opened that in summer while it was somewhat smelly (sealed shut) out by the garbage area :)

Re:Paaaleeese

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That's what I'm saying. Buck up! It's just a smell. Some people work around bad smells, they learn to live with it.

If a smell makes you puke are you sure it was just the smell and not something else? How do you tell?

Nature has conditioned most animals, including us, to puke and otherwise have bad reactions to harmful substances. Sometimes it is simply due to some sort of genetic programming wherein our bodies know that some bad tastes and bad smells mean something is fucked up and we don't want that shit anywhere near us.

Re:Paaaleeese

[dbIII]

I was about to tell a co-worker a dingo joke (dingo came into court to bring up evidence) until I realised that if Azaria was around today my co-worker would be younger.
Unlike the Azaria case (where the supposed dingo or accomplice was able to use scissors and bury the clothes seperately) an English tourist was most definitely eaten by dingoes a few years ago, although it's not clear if they were the cause of death. Another odd thing is dingoes very closely resemble the breed of dogs that are eaten in the northeast of China.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Then there's the people who puke when they smell puke. I would think this funny but my son puked while walking into a store, so we do the responsible thing and make sure the store knows the mess is there. The person who goes to clean it up then pukes so we stand there for like 10 minutes while another employee is found that can handle the smell.

That's precisely the evolutionary defense mechanism the other poster was talking about.

If we're all part of the same small tribe, we're all eating the same stuff. If you eat something that causes you to honk your guts out, I benefit if my nausea threshold is set to a hair-trigger. You may have taken in too many toxins from that bad batch of antelope meat, but if some of us are feeling queasy and you set us off, there are now two or three pools of puke on the cave floor. The guy who's just started nibbling on the antelope honks his guts out long before he's eaten a dangerous amount. And the guy who hasn't even begun to eat, suddenly decides to skip dinner.

Replace "toxins from that bad batch of antelope meat" with "alcohol from that rotten fruit that makes us feel happy-funny", or "those mushrooms the Shaman picked today", and you've got the prehistoric version of the frat party. Same basic result: the body ensures that the party ends before it gets out of hand.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Capsaicin]

The article explicitly states that the person cleaning the fridge was not affected (effected?) due to allergies which prevent her from smelling.

I found that very interesting too. It's not that the smellers "need to grow balls," which is easy for GP to write, not having been subject to said smell. But that a sensation apparently unrelated to actual toxicity could so profoundly affect a number of people as to require hospitalisation. Amazing things humans.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Grammatically correct, yet factually wrong. He wanted to "effect change" in his wallet. And in his KFC bucket.

Crap! He would have just stayed being a lawyer if that's all he wanted.

Re:Paaaleeese

[DynaSoar]

Bring on the comments about how so-and-so knows somebody's grandma that was so affected by smell xyz that something bad happened. Big whoop. Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.

How about comments from the spouse of a US Army master sergeant (26 years, now retired) who can describe olfactory assault agents that cause "nausea and vomiting" (per TFA) so severe that the the target is disabled for days to weeks? The gastrointestinal system continues to react to anything ingested with physically debilitating spasms for days, and the sphincter and peristalsis musculatures is strained to such a degree that they can't function properly for weeks. Unless they are allowed to heal by providing hydration and nourishment by other means (ie. IV, as intubation instigates the same reactions) the repeated reactions prevent recovery and the subject can die of dehydration or even starvation. Survival can easily require medical attention. Some test animals were so affected psychologically despite less than fatal physiological damage that they refused food and water and died. Human reactions of this severity are only hypothesized as testing was not done to this extent. Toxic chemicals and pathogens are not the only the only causes of conditions that can require medical attention. Some of these agents are nothing more than high concentrations of otherwise nontoxic compounds resulting from natural processes. Having been discovered/created, these agents were not weaponized because of the concentration requirement. It was estimated that more casualties would occur due to production and handling up through delivery (situations of high concentration) than by most battle situations (situations where dispersion would rapidly lower concentrations) resulting in more friendly fire hits than target neutralization. She declines to pass along the specifics, but her training manuals describe the effects vividly.

In short, you're wrong; medical attention can be necessary from exposure to nontoxic, nonpathogen agents.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

funny, when I google the term this post is the first result...

Re:Paaaleeese

[__aaclcg7560]

I had neighbor he told us everything about the neighborhood, including the apartment that I just moved into. There was a god awful smell during one long weekend a few months earlier, neighbors called the police, and the police took their time setting up for a homicide investigation because they thought someone got murdered inside. Turned out that the contractor that the landlord hired removed the old toilet without sealing off the sewer pipe. The replacement toilet arrived the following Monday.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree with that. I suffer from hayfever, which (in the times when I have it) means I cannot smell anything. This has resulted in a couple of cases, in a past life, where I didn't realize how much moldy stuff there was lying around the kitchen, garbage bin etc, until I started feeling nauseous and (eventually!) clicked onto why. Even then, I couldn't smell anything but it still caused all the physical symptoms.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Peaceful_Patriot]

Its also possible that with the vomiting and the combination of chemicals the paramedics may have decided to play it safe and send everyone with severe symptoms to the hospital.

When you are dealing with a chemical stew, it may be better to assume the worst until they knew otherwise.

Re:Paaaleeese

[frehe]

If a smell makes you puke are you sure it was just the smell and not something else? How do you tell?

Yes, I've pondered over this question many times after having entered the bathrooms at my university after the resident muslims have used them for Wudu. Imagine entering a steam sauna packed with sweaty socks and falafel, and you start to glimpse the horrors awaiting the person who dares to enter these dungeons of olfactory danger.

Re:Paaaleeese

[LoRdTAW]

That job title is called "commercial diver". Don't know about the nose part but the salary can easily attract a wife.

Re:Paaaleeese

[vivtho]

Also, if there's mould growing on the food, then it can cause health problems in some people.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like one person became ill, and then the programmed herd instinct took over.

Ah, the classic chain reaction group throwup. No comedy is complete without it.

Re:Paaaleeese

[andersa]

It seems unlikely that that many people would be allergic.

It couldn't have been toxic gases from mixing of the cleaning agents or the lady doing the cleaning would certainly have been affected most. Not being able to smell doesn't give you immunity to toxic gases.

Likely the people just felt ill because of the bad smell and felt the need to see a doctor about it.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about strong stomach, it's about being able to handle different things. Many coroners-in-training quit just because they can't handle it. And on the flipside, there are coroners who are ready to throw up if they feel the smell of spoiled vegetables.

Re:Paaaleeese

[fractoid]

Ah, you must be from the Internet.

Re:Paaaleeese

[pyster]

Agreed. Sounds like kids wanting to get out of skewl. Complete asshattery.

Re:Paaaleeese

[fractoid]

So you would say that his post effected your post... in effect? ;)

Re:Paaaleeese

[fractoid]

When you are dealing with a chemical stew, it may be better to assume the worst until they knew otherwise.

I dunno, I generally just add salt until it tastes good.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

The Culture drones and Minds also have effector weaponry/manipulators, IIRC :D

Re:Paaaleeese

[malkavian]

It's due to the fact nasty stuff grows in bad food; There are fungal spores and airborne bacteria.
If there's vomiting involved, then they've got a conclusive exposure. The hospital trip will be to give them a quick checkup and make sure they're covered. You can either give them a quick prophylactic treatment then, or hope all's good, and perhaps later be trying to scrape mushrooms out of their lungs.
Everyone else would likely have been told to see their doc sharpish if they exhibit fevers or breathing difficulties.
Mostly, it's unlikely to be too harmful, but better safe than sorry.. And whoever cleaned the thing should probably have been given shots, as they'd have been ground zero as they stirred up all the 'nice colourful things' growing there.

Re:Paaaleeese

[bitchzilla]

Good answer emc..but that would be to logical!

Re:Paaaleeese

[bitchzilla]

Seriously! Every office I have worked in had cleaning products,,,sorry princess we dont all have maids or "the help" to clean up when things are messy. BTW if you noticed the mess and decided to clean it the resposible person would come prepared with cleaning products. Stupid Git

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

ever seen the movie Idiocracy?

Re:Paaaleeese

[Spatial]

I said that to one of my coworkers once. She responded, "Are you a troll?"

She meant WoW, but it really caught me off guard...

Re:Paaaleeese

[spun]

You are making so little sense I don't even know what you are talking about, or who you are angry at.

Follow the thread, lady, we aren't talking about the office fridge anymore. Stupid people who don't know how to read piss me off.

Re:Paaaleeese

[clone53421]

One of the recommendations in the case of possible chlorine exposure is to take shallow breaths to limit inhalation of the chemical. I find it entirely plausible that sinus congestion could limit someone's exposure to a non-acute level.

Re:Paaaleeese

[clone53421]

Yeah, it's hard to smell when you can barely inhale.

Re:Paaaleeese

[FredFredrickson]

When someone has a valid point, Mr Fredrickson stops replying.

Nah, I just got off the internet for a bit. Anyhow- I will admit, in that situation, I'd probably go to the hospital as well. If I was the boss, or HR there, I'd require everyone to go. They didn't know if it was a pathogen or toxin.

So everybody's convinced me.

I guess I just reacted to the article- 7 people sent to the hospital! As if they were soooo affected, as opposed to a precaution for an otherwise harmless smell.

Anyhow- I deserve to be the troll of this thread, I suppose- but don't write me off for non-idle- type discussions. I do feed off debate.

Re:Paaaleeese

[bitchzilla]

excuse me.

Re:Paaaleeese

[spun]

Sorry, sorry, didn't mean to snap at you.

Re:Paaaleeese

[bitchzilla]

Thanks

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

If they mixed ammonia and chlorine that would have really done it. The worst smelling stuff would likely be meat products with active mold on them.. gray or black mold especially. There was an obscure fridge or two in the old MIT AI/LCS lab of the 1990's that had some pretty bad mold/bacteria issues. If you dared to put your food in there it would be more likely to go bad faster, I think.

Re:Paaaleeese

[smithmc]

Don't forget vocal chord rupture. James Labrie of Dream Theater had this happen after eating in Cuba and getting food poisoning. Ten years later, he was fully recovered. In the meantime, he had nowhere near the vocal range that he used to.

And sadly, in the meantime, Dream Theater continued to exist.

Re:Paaaleeese

[Anonymous Coward]

... or rather, meat products with "dead body rot" types of bacteria. Humans evolved to be especially sensitive to body-meat rot and fecal matter odors, for obvious reasons.

Re:Paaaleeese

[carn1fex]

Yea they can have some interesting effects. I was in the amazon rainforest camping for the first time two weeks ago. After a day of just hiking around i closed my eyes and realized i was definitely hallucinating. I think it was something I was inhaling.. pretty much the same story each day until we were way out on the widest parts of the river on the boat for awhile.. strange..

Re:Paaaleeese

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Fair enough - at the point I'd posted this, I'd just seen you actively involved in a few discussions in this thread, then stop just when folks raised points that were (IMO) quite valid. Not being online does indeed make it difficult to respond...

Re:Paaaleeese

[Hurricane78]

Nah. There is a specialized job for those kind of divers. Because an average commercial diver will refuse to do such a (literal) shit job. ^^

Re:Paaaleeese

[atraintocry]

heh, i read that as "compliments" :)

Re:Paaaleeese

[rubah]

Sometimes one puker starts a chain reaction.

One eighth grade day in Science class, an attention seeking girl who had recently eaten a tunafish sandwich decided to play Morning Sickness all over her desk. We had to vacate the classroom, and several girls ran for the toilets to lose their breakfasts. I came pretty close myself, if only because I can't stand tunafish.

Re:Paaaleeese

[emc]

1. You go into the bathroom and get paper towels and water.
2. Go back to the spot of the 'incident'.
3. Lower yourself towards the floor, and while using appropriate pressure, apply the wet towels on the 'incident',removing the bodily fluids from the floor.

Seriously dude, you don't need half a gallon of acetic acid and hip waders. You just need to take responsibility for what you and your family do, and sometimes that involves cleaning up your own mess.

Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[Dripdry]

Toys in the Attic: "So what was the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[Moryath]

It's livin' in the Fridge! you can't stop the mold from groooooowwwiiinnnn...

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[SolarStorm]

Actually, the real lesson is: dont clean! (now thats my kind of lesson)

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[Randle_Revar]

I came here to say this, but I see you have it covered.

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[Colonel Korn]

Toys in the Attic:
"So what was the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."

I was just about to post the same thing. I wonder whether the hazmat team included a kid to just eat the offending rot.

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I got a hold of a real Ganymede rock lobster. I put it in the storage fridge so no one else would eat it and I forgot about it for a whole year. I wonder what it looks like after all this time?"

You beat me. I've been watching the whole series the last couple of weeks on DVD (they finally released a good remaster).

Man, did I laugh at that episode. I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

Unfortunately the hazmat team didn't have it as easy as pushing the whole fridge out the airlock.

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[AceJohnny]

Not sure if you're referencing it, but someone already made the link:

Cowboy Bebop / Weird Al Anime Music Video

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[HTH NE1]

You know, I've been meaning to do an anime music video mixing that song with that episode of Cowboy Bebop.

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone?

[HTH NE1]

Ah, and now I won't have to do it myself.

That leaves more time for my other remixes I also haven't had time to realize.

Apparantly

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

They forgot to clean out the fridge at the Michael Scott Paper Company.

Re:Apparantly

[Praeluceo]

Surely you meant to say Dunder Mifflin Paper Company? Heaven forbid Michael Scott ever become anything more than middle management!

Re:Apparantly

[omnichad]

*spoiler alert* Apparently you haven't been keeping up with the show...

Re:Apparantly

[CuriHP]

You should watch some more recent episodes.

Re:Apparantly

[Dishevel]

Surely you meant to say Dunder Mifflin Paper Company? Heaven forbid Michael Scott ever become anything more than middle management!

No. What he really means is the Disco / Coffee bar.

Re:Apparantly

[Spazztastic]

That would be Cafe Disco, sir.

Re:Apparantly

[smithmc]

Surely you meant to say Dunder Mifflin Paper Company? Heaven forbid Michael Scott ever become anything more than middle management!

Surely you meant to say the Wernham Hogg Paper Company. And who's this Michael Scott bloke?

Re:Apparantly

[Praeluceo]

It would seem that I shouldn't toss my 2 cents in if I'm going to watch a show Season-by-Season on DVD. Especially not if I'm only on Season 3 out of a potential 5. Shoot, I guess I've gotta get busy with watching more television!

Chemistry lab

[stillnotelf]

I've worked in a chemistry lab that shared space with a lab using some really noxious amine compounds (cadaverine is named that way for a reason...). Mostly they weren't hospital-toxic, just nasty. Whenever they had to open their fridge we cleared out of the room for 10 minutes to let the fumes dissipate up the venting hoods.

Re:Chemistry lab

[Anonymous Coward]

"using two cleaning chemicals" bleach + ammonia = chlorine gas, hydrazine, chloramines = lung damage.
might not have been the food.

Re:Chemistry lab

[smellsofbikes]

Be glad you weren't working next to an intense lachrymator like some of the ethyne derivatives. It's amazing to watch someone open a container in a fume hood and within ten seconds everyone in the lab is running for the door with tears streaming down their faces (and retching.)

A terminal diamine only one carbon off cadaverine is named putrescine. It's also pretty nasty. Even purified butyric acid is astoundingly horrible stuff: years later, even a whiff of slightly rancid butter (from which name butyric acid derives) makes my stomach turn.

Re:Chemistry lab

[innocent_white_lamb]

A highway traffic patrol officer I used to know had an accident at his weigh scale station once. A shelf containing toilet bowl cleaner and a bottle of bleach fell off of the wall behind the toilet and broke. He had to crawl out of the station on his hands and knees. Afterward he showed me his cap badge which had corroded where it was hanging on a coat hook. They had to replace most of the electronics in the scale after that.

Moral: Never put bleach and toilet bowl cleaner on the same shelf.

Re:Chemistry lab

[stillnotelf]

It sounds like you needed a more powerful fume hood - the whole point of the hood is to prevent problems like that! Of course, I never pulled the window down for maximum flow like I was supposed to, either...

Re:Chemistry lab

[saforrest]

even a whiff of slightly rancid butter (from which name butyric acid derives)

I thought that it was called butyric acid because it has four carbon atoms, just as butane does, and this was just some random IUPAC convention (like "meth" with 1 carbon and "eth" with two.) So you're saying that butane is called butane because of butyric acid?

I had never heard of any association of the "but-" prefix with butter before. I wonder if it was English or German that contributed it, since "butter" is one of those odd words that's exactly the same in both languages.

Re:Chemistry lab

[HTH NE1]

Occasionally you get a chem student who thinks the fume hood works like the sneeze guard at a salad bar and forgets that he has to actually turn it on himself.

Re:Chemistry lab

[smellsofbikes]

Now we're talking about things I learned 20 years ago, so let's say I'm somewhat fuzzy on the details. However, my memory is that German chemists first found and named the carboxylic acids, since they were stinky and easy to isolate: formic, acetic, proprionic, and butyric acid. They already knew about methyl and ethyl alcohol from obvious sources, but when they were sort of standardizing common usage names, they ended up using methyl and ethyl from the alcohol family, and propyl and butyl from the carboxylic acid family, to define the numbers of carbons.

Caproic acid, which is what makes goats stinky (well, aside from their general goat nature) was named from the latin word for goat. I am fairly sure the same was the case with butyric, but if I'm wrong I'd be interested in hearing a better butter etymology.

Re:Chemistry lab

[Anonymous Coward]

A terminal diamine only one carbon off cadaverine is named putrescine. It's also pretty nasty.

From Human semen at Wikipedia: "Basic amines such as putrescine, spermine, spermidine and cadaverine are responsible for the smell and flavor of semen.". Ahem, it doesn't smell that bad, does it?

Re:Chemistry lab

[Anonymous Coward]

Putrecine, cadaverine with some yeast makes for probably one of the worst smells you'll ever experience.

Re:Chemistry lab

[MrKaos]

some really noxious amine compounds

Just for a second I thought you were talking about Japanese cartoons. I *obviously* know nothing about chemistry.

Re:Chemistry lab

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral: Never put bleach and toilet bowl cleaner on the same shelf.

Protip: Bleach is A LOT cheaper than toilet bowl cleaner and works better (IMO). Many times, just pour a little and flush next time you are in that bathroom. No scrubbing unless you need to get above the waterline.

Re:Chemistry lab

[Anonymous Coward]

Better idea: Don't bother buying toilet bowl cleaner and use bleach to clean that too!

Better be careful...

[Smidge207]

I hear you can be arrested for taking pictures of an open 'fridge's innards. ;-)

=Smidge=

Re:Better be careful...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you can be arrested for taking pictures of an open 'fridge's innards. ;-)

Only if you're a douchebag.

Re:Better be careful...

[pnewhook]

I hear you can be arrested for taking pictures of an open 'fridge's innards. ;-)

Only if you are Google. Then you'd be accused of violating privacy rights of the mold and even be banned in some countries.

Indiana Jones

[RedShirtsDieFirst]

Did they find Indy inside?

Re:Indiana Jones

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they did, and oddly enough, tucked away in the corner was a small bowl of Chilled Monkey Brains.

Re:Indiana Jones

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they find Indy inside?

Did they find Indy inside?

I don't think he made it...

Re:Indiana Jones

[maglor_83]

Of course not. He has never, and will never, be in a fridge. NEVER EVER!

The main rule

[SnarfQuest]

If you can't tell what something is through the plastic wrapper due to strange color or texture, then don't open it! Nothing good ever came out of one of these packages.

Re:The main rule

[93,000]

Likewise, when someone says 'Hey, smell this,' never, NEVER do it. It will not end well.

That's the first rule I taught my children. Then I moved on to that talking to strangers thing.

Re:The main rule

[Chabo]

My last employer was decently small (~100 people), and there were strict rules to try to prevent this problem:

If it has no name, throw it out, even if it's not yours.
If it has a name but no date, ask the person about it, and throw it out if they don't say "keep it". If they tell you they'll take care of it, don't believe them.
If it has a name and an old date, ask the person about it, and be prepared to throw it out.
Every month or so, send out an e-mail saying "Everything in the fridge gets thrown out by the end of the day.", and then do it.

My current employer is a larger company, and just has a policy of emptying all fridges at the end of every week.

Re:The main rule

[Chabo]

As a former chemist, I'm willing to smell something, but I never let anyone stick something in my face; if I'm going to smell something, it's either going to be on a flat surface, or in MY hand. Then I "waft" the scent towards my nose from a good distance with my hand, and if I still can't smell anything, then I might go closer.

Acid fumes teach you that lesson real quick.

Re:The main rule

[mmkkbb]

I worked for a company that built label printers. They conveniently placed an automatic label printer at every fridge. You pressed a button, and a label would print out with an expiration date. Anything past expiration or without a label was tossed daily.

Re:The main rule

[commodoresloat]

if I'm going to smell something, it's either going to be on a flat surface, or in MY hand.

Acid fumes teach you that lesson real quick.

Let me get this straight so I don't mess it up ... if I'm going to be smelling acid fumes, I should pour the acid on my hand first?

Re:The main rule

[Chabo]

Hold the container in your hand, or place it on a flat surface. The point is, if I'm smelling something, I'm not letting someone stick it in my face.

Re:The main rule

[stefanlasiewski]

If it has a name but no date, LEAVE IT ON THEIR DESK ON FRIDAY at 5:00PM.

If it has a name and an old date, LEAVE IT ON THEIR DESK ON FRIDAY at 5:00PM.

Every month or so, check if anyone is on a 3 week vacation, then send out an e-mail saying "Everything in the fridge gets LEFT ON THE VACATIONERS DESK", and then do it.

Re:The main rule

[Z00L00K]

Using some smells are also a way of teaching dogs to not be too over-enthusiastic about what's offered them.

I have tried that, although with nice things. Tea is one thing that dogs don't favor. Could be good to know to train them to be politely interested instead of overwhelmingly attacking what's offered.

Re:The main rule

[shogun]

I worked for a company that built label printers. They conveniently placed an automatic label printer at every fridge. You pressed a button, and a label would print out with an expiration date. Anything past expiration or without a label was tossed daily.

How did the printer know what the expiry date should be? Or was it always just one week hence or the like?

Re:The main rule

[hkhanna]

I accidentally inhaled the fumes of 16 molar sulfuric acid in college chemistry lab because I was an idiot and didn't take it into the chemical hood before opening it. I head a headache for a week.

Re:The main rule

[Ogive17]

I learned that trick from Mr. Wizard.

Re:The main rule

[Bruce Perens]

When someone sticks a flower in my face, I really have to overcome an urge to deck them. It's as if they've never heard of allergies.

Re:The main rule

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone went to the hospital in my junior year of high school because of failing to 'waft' chemicals. Something tells me though, that when you open a refrigerator and see THAT, that you probably have more problems than 'wafting' the scent. Like, "wheres the flamethrower?" level problems. :P

Re:The main rule

[omnichad]

*woosh!*

Re:The main rule

[geekoid]

At the end of every week, everything but the ice tray gets tossed here.
Yes, I ahve thrown away soda cans that haven't been opened, frozen food and lunch boxes.

Of course, I never use it so to have to clean it makes me grumpy. Add tot he fact having a well paid professional take time out of the work he was hired to do to 'save' some money and not having the cleaning crew do it is stupid.

Re:The main rule

[mrbene]

Did they have a "If the fridge is unplugged, plug it back in" clause?

Re:The main rule

[wooki]

When I used to work shift in a manufacturing plant, every Sunday night was "hog law" night. Anything left in the fridge after midnight went in the can...

Re:The main rule

[JediTrainer]

If it has milk in it, add a teaspoon or two of lemon juice to it at the time of leaving it on their desk.

Re:The main rule

[bughunter]

if I'm smelling something, I'm not letting someone stick it in my face

That's a pretty good rule for dating, as well.

Re:The main rule

[pimpimpim]

and smell the lid, not the container!

Re:The main rule

[brentonboy]

My employer has similar rules, and every weekend they send out an email saying if your food does not have a name and date it will be thrown out.

However, they proceed to throw everything out, regardless of whether or not it has a name or date, regardless of the date.

Re:The main rule

[Chessucat]

Just leave it for the polyester security guard over the weekend. It will be taken care of by Monday morning.

Re:The main rule

[pnewhook]

That's the first rule I taught my children. Then I moved on to that talking to strangers thing.

Is 'pull my finger' before or after 'smell this' ?

Re:The main rule

[Dishevel]

"Could be meat, could be cake. It's Meatcake!"

Re:The main rule

[Anonymous Coward]

you get 3 week vacations?

I hate you and your moldy fridge.

Re:The main rule

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes you are

Re:The main rule

[HTH NE1]

If you can't tell what something is through the plastic wrapper due to strange color or texture, then don't open it! Nothing good ever came out of one of these packages.

Chris: Here Mitch, taste this. Go on, you won't hurt my feelings, just try it.
[Mitch tastes it]
Chris: What do you think, too sweet?
Mitch: What is it?
Chris: I don't know, I found it in one of the labs.
[Mitch starts to induce vomiting]
Chris: Relax, it's just yogurt.

[looking in O'Neill's refrigerator]
Teal'c: Are you conducting some sort of scientific experiment, O'Neill?
Jack O'Neill: Hey, come on, that salsa's still good.

Re:The main rule

[AaronW]

The last two companies I worked at had a policy where everything would be thrown out on Sunday unless it's something frozen in the freezer or something sealed like a can of soda.

The policy seems to work quite well.

Re:The main rule

[Lord Ender]

This is all part of your plan to starve H1Bs, isn't it?

Re:The main rule

[antdude]

My workplace tosses out every Friday. There's a big yellow sign on the fridge door about weekly cleanups. Bags and containers have to say names and dates.

Re:The main rule

[TrekkieGod]

Acid fumes teach you that lesson real quick.

Not only acid fumes. I still remember back when I was in high school, as part of a chemistry lab experiment we were required to dissolve aluminum foil with some strong base. I don't remember what or why, it's been a decade since I took any chemistry, but I do remember that my labmate, who was performing that particular part of the experiment, didn't read the part of the procedure that said, "do this in a fume hood." All I remember is turning around to talk to him (not realizing he was already dissolving the thing), taking a deep breath, and having the taste of aluminum foil in my mouth for the next 4 hours.

Didn't make me want to puke, and the disgustin factor is nothing like what these people are talking about in this thread, but it is definitely not an experience I'd like to repeat.

Re:The main rule

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at AT&T a year or so ago. The building I worked in (and I suspect all of their properties) was rarely cleaned. Like once a week, and then it was to empty the trash and replenish paper in the restroom. It was nasty.

Then there were the people. Morale is very VERY low there (at least it was in IT) and people tended not to care. That doesn't excuse nastiness, but it explains it. Our fridge, while not nearly this bad, was incredibly nasty. I'd often leave my lunch at my desk with an ice pack. Putting it in the fridge was just plain out of the question.

Lack of cleaning, a bunch of indifferent people with sup-par cleanliness standards, and you've got a recipe for a nasty fridge.

AT&T sucks in many ways, and very much so as an employer.

Re:The main rule

[dbIII]

When someone sticks a flower in my face

Is that some annoying practice of religous cults or marketing or something? Where I am nobody goes around poking at people with bunches of flowers, even if they are proud that they just got some from an admirer/lover/spouse. However, with the amount of wattle pollen in the air it's probably the same as if someone did.

Re:The main rule

[Bruce Perens]

People who like to smell flowers tend to do it to other people,

Re:The main rule

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Likewise, when someone says 'Hey, smell this,' never, NEVER do it. It will not end well.

Man I learned that lesson too late. I had a friend of mine hand me a bottle of hydrochloric acid and said "Take a whiff!" It smelled like... burning. I'm being unclear, let me rephrase that. My nose reported that it was on fire.

sounds like vegimite

[meow27]

vegimite..... just smelling that is good enough to go to the hospital.

just smelling it killed my apetite for a month.

new Zealanders eat it like as if it were creamcheese

could have been vegimite :P

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Peter Simpson]

It's "Vegemite" and yes, it is an "acquired taste"

(best acquired in childhood)

Re:sounds like vegimite

[bothemeson]

...but isn't!

I reckon you mean vegemite - the national dish of Australians (the world over).

I wouldn't like to get between an Ocker and you if he finds out you've said his fave grub was from Kiwi-land!

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also not supposed to be spread on thick like peanut butter. A common mistake from what I gather -- no wonder some people are put off by it.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[confused one]

As an American born son of a New Zealander... What's wrong with Vegemite? I thought it was supposed to be used like cream cheese.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Dextrously]

Not always true, I worked at a company with a receptionist who originally came from Australia. The first time she gave me some Vegemite, I was in love.. mix it with some Mountain Dew, and you have a recipe for yumminess. :) Now if only I knew where to find it locally, mind you, I am lazy, so I haven't looked very hard.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[lucifuge31337]

Is that like marmite? If so, I agree.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[lucifuge31337]

Yes...replying to myself. Yes...it is like marmite. Nothing like eating the trash from a brewery (with added spices).

Re:sounds like vegimite

[iron-kurton]

That stuff is bad-tasting shoe polish. And I ate shoe-polish as a kid.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Anonymous Coward]

New Zealanders eat Marmite. Australians eat Vegemite. Note: Previous sentance may contrain traces of gross generalisation.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Caity]

Oddly, the best way to acquire it as an adult (should you want to) is to have it on toasted turkish bread (with margarine).

I've tested this theory on a number of immigrants, many of whom had had previous bad experiences with the black stuff. Most have ended up with "turkish veg" as their "I was running late for work and had to get breakfast at a cafe" breakfast.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[VoltageX]

Probably Marmite or another variant in NZ.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[beav007]

Marmite is absolutely horrible - far too sweet. Vegemite is much better.

Marmite looks like Vegemite, and that's about it.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Cimexus]

I love Vegemite (disclaimer: I am Australian). Maybe you do have to acquire the taste in childhood but I don't see how it's that bad. It's salty ... that's about it.

Biggest mistake people trying it for the first time make is trying to spread it as if it were peanut butter. You only need a very light scraping of it. Think of it more like wasabi or something ... you don't go pasting it on half an inch thick. But it adds a nice salty kick to savoury foods.

When I was in America (IL, WI, MN), small Vegemite jars could be obtained in any regular supermarket. So there must be SOME market for it there, otherwise why would it be stocked in standard supermarkets?

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Anenome]

Reaction #1: WTF is vegemite. Gah.

#2: Sure, 'Turkish bread' yet another thing I've never heard of. So, does a Turkish man actually have to make it, or does it have, like, soil from the mother-country baked right in? Or, is it the bread with the 'Guaranteed to include 20% Real Turk Parts, accept no substitute!' label? There are some 'delicacies' I don't need to try :P

#3: Are you sure that's normal, regular margarine and not, say, Yak-milk margarine? I was going for the 'never heard of it' trifecta.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Anenome]

You think that's bad, try the most ethnic thing I cold find in the world of Japanese cooking: Natto.

It's a mixture that looks and smells and tastes exactly like barf. Unrecognizeable multi-colored chunks of who-knows-what are mixed together in a clear sticky slime apparently gathered from the tracks of snails, almost like a glue, far stickier than honey, and otherwise flavorless. Anyway, that's my memory of trying it-- a life-altering event, to be sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natto
Now remember, this is the wikipedia description of Natto, trying to be impartial: "The first thing noticed by the uninitiated after opening a pack of natt is the very strong ammoniacal smell, akin to strong cheese. Stirring the natt produces lots of spiderweb-like strings. The natt itself has a taste somewhat akin to glue."

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Stalky]

That would be the Marmite made in New Zealand, which actually has sugar added.

Vegemite has a milder flavor than British Marmite, which is not at all sweet.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[beav007]

Fascinating. Perhaps we in Australia are being subjected to NZ Marmite? Or maybe the Marmite in New Zealand is actually made in Australia.

Regardless, Promite is probably the worst *mite.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[conufsed]

First time I've seen Vegemite associates with kiwi's most people know it as an aussie food

Re:sounds like vegimite

[ElderKorean]

vegimite..... just smelling that is good enough to go to the hospital.
just smelling it killed my apetite for a month.
new Zealanders eat it like as if it were creamcheese

Vegemite should be nice and thick on the bread, even better is to eat it with a spoon.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[vegiVamp]

like cream cheese, only a lot less fattening. Maybe you should try it again :-)

Re:sounds like vegimite

[xaxa]

Marmite is OK in small quantities.

Bovril sounds worse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril

Originally called "Johnstone's fluid beef". Yum?

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Sobrique]

Regardless, Promite is probably the worst *mite.

No, that title is reserved for the varroa-mite

Re:sounds like vegimite

[nightranger]

Bovril? Yuck! Takes me back to Sunday morning swimming lessons in the late 60's in Hounslow (U.K.) public baths. Ok, the pool wasnt heated but the temperature of the Bovril made up for that. Never again.

Re:sounds like vegimite

[smithmc]

(best acquired in childhood)

You mean like cases of malignant narcissism?

Re:sounds like vegimite

[Khomar]

The funny thing about vegemite is that the Australians eat it like we eat peanut butter, and many of them feel about peanut butter the same way we feel about vegemite. To each their own, I guess. To their credit, at least vegemite is healthier than peanut butter.

And the one cleaning the fridge?

[Gat0r30y]

28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

There is no justice.

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment â" she can't smell because of allergies.

Re:And the one cleaning the fridge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait--how is it unjust that the poor sap cleaning the fridge didn't have any problems? I mean, she didn't leave the food in the refrigerator to rot, did she?

Re:And the one cleaning the fridge?

[Divide By Zero]

How do you think she got roped into doing it in the first place?

"The refrigerator is downright noxious. Somebody needs to clean it."

"Sally can't smell anything anyhow, make her do it."

"It's gross as hell, but at least I don't have to smell it. Okay."

Re:And the one cleaning the fridge?

[geekoid]

Sounds like 28 people made shit up to go home early and take a couple of days.

Strange coincidence

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I have just finish cleaning my fridge, no kidding! Creepy.

Re:Strange coincidence

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Totally. I just finished posting the same day you did too, how's that for coincidence!

Re:Strange coincidence

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I meant that I had just finished cleaning my nastily dirty fridge and then I came to Slashdot and saw an article on the dangers of cleaning nastily dirty fridges. They *could* have warned me in advance!

There's something weird in the fridge today...

[Chris Mattern]

...I don't know what it is.
Food I can't recogni-i-ize...

Re:There's something weird in the fridge today...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can judge a sandwich
By the color of its mold
Then mister, you're a better mannnnnnnn than I-I-I... YAH!

Re:There's something weird in the fridge today...

[snspdaarf]

As Carlin used to say, "Could be steak, could be cake!"

Re:There's something weird in the fridge today...

[Dishevel]

As Carlin used to say, "Could be meat, could be cake!"

He then went on to say It's Meatcake!

Re:There's something weird in the fridge today...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cosby.

You idiots....

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my lunch you assholes. I was saving that......

Re:You idiots....

[Chris Mattern]

That was my lunch you assholes. I was saving that......

"Someone has disposed of all our blue, furry food!"

Re:You idiots....

[camperdave]

"Someone has disposed of all our blue, furry food!"

Hmmm... What happens if you leave a Muppet in the fridge?

Re:You idiots....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Someone has disposed of all our blue, furry food!"

Hmmm... What happens if you leave a Muppet in the fridge?

Children will cry once they learn you eat Muppets?

Re:You idiots....

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens if you leave a Muppet in the fridge?

It gets cold?

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that's what I call a sticky situation!

Oh Man! They threw Away My Lunch!

[SirBitBucket]

There's always some bozo who has to go and throw away my lunch. Who are they to judge the malodoressness of my victuals??

Monthly tossing day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our office has a policy. Anything left in the fridge after the 31st of every month is removed start of the next business day and thrown out. (Unless it has the current days date on it.)

Aha!

[AngryK9]

So it's true. AT&T really does stink.

My fridge...

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone opened my fridge right now....I'd be charged with chemical or biological warfare...it's horrendous.

The lower compartments I haven't opened in several months and I know whatever is growing down there is alive...

Food goes to its grave in my fridge.

Please... no more

[wigaloo]

If I wanted to read about stuff like this, I wouldn't have disabled idle.slashdot.org in my preferences. This is neither "News for Nerds" nor "Stuff that Matters". And how exactly is this "Entertainment"? Please don't continue to ruin slashdot with this crap.

Re:Please... no more

[Khashishi]

I was entertained.

Re:Please... no more

[DarKnyht]

It's posted so we can read such insightful comments such as yours...

Re:Please... no more

[geekoid]

It's science.

Please, keep up the good work /.!

Re:Please... no more

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

And how exactly is this "Entertainment"?

It'll make more sense if you ever work in an office environment. Also, when that happens, you'll discover Dilbert is actually funny.

It wasn't the Fridge...

[Root Down]

Note that if you read the sentence carefully, there is nothing that said the fridge itself was the cause of the odor!

"AN OFFICE WORKER cleaning a fridge full of rotten food CREATED A SMELL so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital..."

I'm pretty sure every office has one of those guys...

Re:It wasn't the Fridge...

[GodfatherofSoul]

"This message was paid for by Americans for Refrigeration Freedom." Was it really necessary to stand up for the fridge in this story?

Re:It wasn't the Fridge...

[Migraineman]

About a decade ago, I worked with a Vietnamese guy. His very-traditional Vietnamese wife would prepare his lunch for him every day. Wednesdays were ... the dreaded "dead fish" sandwich. Folks learned to avoid the beak room, as he would put this fish-goop sandwich into the microwave and ... OH GOD, THE HORRID STENCH ! I'M HAVING A FLASHBACK !!! KILL ME NOW.

I don't know what it was, but it had the power to clear the second-floor break room in about 30 seconds.

Re:It wasn't the Fridge...

[DieNadel]

Ha, so true... we call ours "The Bomberman" :-D

Re:It wasn't the Fridge...

[rts008]

It sounds like you are describing Nuoc mam.
To microwave that stuff would be pure evil...

Not Friday...

[bughunter]

For a second, I thought it was Friday on Slashdot.

Just another day at the office for me...

[AB3A]

--of course I have job sites on sewer pumping stations and waste-water treatment plants.

Not only does it smell bad where I work, but it can kill you if you're not careful. People dump all sorts of things down the drain that they shouldn't. I've heard stories of entire tanker loads of gasoline getting dumped, Ether, Perc, Jet fuel, and some mysterious stuff that glowed blue coming from what used to be called the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST).

During large thunderstorms, the sewer pipes often see huge flows that scour all the grease that people dump down the drain (DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!) in to large globs the size of beach balls. These tend to block flow at the waste-water stations and cause sewer backup until someone can get down there and pitch-fork it apart.

And Mike Rowe thinks HE does dirty jobs...

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Muad'Dave]

Submit it to discovery.com/dirtyjobs - you might be famous!

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[AB3A]

The hard part is getting him there exactly when we have the first few thunderstorms of the season. That's when most of the grease from the previous fall and winter gets scoured from the pipe walls.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Sponge Bath]

And Mike Rowe thinks HE does dirty jobs...

He did an episode maintaining the first stage of a sewage processing facility. It looked pretty bad. The recent show where he collects rotting maggot infested cow corpses into a truck and then processes them with a large industrial grinder into a pulpy brown protein liquid is worse.

Fortunately the liquid is turned into animal feed and does not directly enter the human food supply where it could be left in an office fridge to become something disgusting.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[smellsofbikes]

>During large thunderstorms, the sewer pipes often see huge flows that scour all the grease that people dump down the drain (DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!) in to large globs the size of beach balls. These tend to block flow at the waste-water stations and cause sewer backup

There's an easy solution to this problem: start dumping chips of plutonium down the all the drains. Whenever there's a stop-up, they'll collect in a mass and that'll fix the blockage.

You may observe that there are some collateral problems with dumping lots of plutonium down the drain. I have an answer for that, too: we train gorillas to go into the sewers and collect all the plutonium chips that haven't been used. Then once winter comes...

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[AB3A]

Radioactive Gorillas? That's almost as good as Sharks with Frickin' lasers!

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Muad'Dave]

It's TV - If you need a thunderstorm, simulate! A few giant firetrucks should do the trick. Call him in well before the first storm, and release the flood!

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[geekoid]

"(DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!) "

This annoys me to no end.
Her's one, learn t properly remove it. The Japanese managed to do it, it's not fucking magic.

I pay for the Sewage to be taken away. This means my Shit, Piss, ground up leftovers and, yes, grease.

Fix your issue and stop blaming the customers.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[richard.cs]

I'm guessing you were expecting an explosion, as I read that I was thinking that as the plutonium chips built up they'd get hot and melt the grease before it gets that far. would probably work well right until they all collect in a settling tank at the sewage plant.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the glowing blue stuff be Bonnie Bassler's bacteria? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVfmUfr8VPA

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[socrplayr813]

I don't know for sure, but I would guess the blue stuff was just a pH buffer solution (used to calibrate pH meters) or similar. Maybe not the BEST thing to flush down the drain, but probably not overly dangerous.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[bughunter]

Hey - I used to work at NIST-Boulder many decades ago... when it was still NBS.

Fun times, sneaking all that fluorescent dye into my cow-orkers' coffee. Boy did they come out of the crappers looking surprised.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[dwpro]

DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!

I don't do this, but I'm still confused as to what I am supposed to do with grease.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then go to the website and get mike's ass out to where you work

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[myth24601]

DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!

I don't do this, but I'm still confused as to what I am supposed to do with grease.

You dump it in the toilet so it doesn't back up your sink.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[vlm]

DON'T DUMP, GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN

Huh?

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[R2.0]

Worked in a small sewage treatment plant at a nuclear power plant for a spell. 2 things I remember:

1) I didn't puke at the smell, but I almost did when I saw the plant operator use his bare hand and a Mason jar to take a sample of the raw sewage.

2) Every year, the plant would need to import raw sewage from outside because all the good bacteria would die off. This would generally happen right after the start of an outage, where the plant would bring in LOTS of temporary workers, most female. The best we could figure, the huge influx of dumping their sanitary products into the toilets (picture a small sea of tampon applicators that need to be skimmed off) killed the aerobic bacteria.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let it cool and coagulate and throw it in the trash.

How to Get Rid of Old Kitchen Grease and Cooking Oil

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[RollingThunder]

Pour it in to METAL containers (coffee cans are ideal, as long as they're not cheap cardboard-walled ones). Let it cool then cap it and store it, slowly filling the container (or quickly, depending on how much bacon you eat...).

When near full, put the container in the trash. Done and done.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Archon-X]

On the flip side, I'm an urban explorer that spends my time trudging through sewers for fun.
Normally, they're not so bad, as sewerage is more grey water than anything else - it normally has an interesting smell of detergent, shampoo, and an undercurrent of poo.

However, if you're walking through a low-flow section, or a poorly made section (where it dams), or any backed up sections, and happen to stir up the sediment, you need to get out of there fast - no only does it stink, but the noxious gases hit fatal within minutes.

And you're absolutely right: grease in sewers is disgusting. It soaks up every horrid smell, every putrid tidbit, clings to the walls, and, even worse, makes everything super slippery - the last thing you want when you're knee-deep in a torrent of shit.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Archon-X]

If you ever happen to stroll around in sewers (it's not as terrible as it seems) - you'll find these little 'white mice' have a habit of all congregating in one place, due to their similar buoyancy properties, I imagine.

Under London, in the famous River Fleet sewer, there's a little side-tunnel named 'Tampon Alley', for a very good reason.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[smellsofbikes]

I was actually basing that on a real-life incident at Hanford in Washington. They had lathes machining plutonium under oil lubrication, and they had drain systems to catch the oil and pump it to a place where they could recover the plutonium.
At one point in the drain system there was a low point, that somehow the designers missed. Plutonium chips would settle there. At some point, enough had accumulated that it exceeded critical mass, and began to heat up, at which point the oil boiled, blasting all the chips up into the oil, where they slowly settled back down, starting the cycle over again. So it didn't explode, it just kept pulsing out these enormous blasts of energy that set off every detector in the whole area, and then stopped again in less than a second. Apparently it was extremely difficult to track down, as you might imagine.
I was told this by someone who worked at Hanford, who said it had happened in the 1960's.
So, yeah, all it'd do is melt the grease, but that's all he needed.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[waterford0069]

I don't think you fully comprehend the amount of water released by a good old fashioned thunderstorm. It may only be a few millimeters, but its over a huge area.

It would take a fleet of firetrucks greater than half the star fleet.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[bugs2squash]

So you feed the ground cow back to cows. Didn't the brits have a problem with that ?

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[AB3A]

I agree. Most sewage that we process is "fresh" and we try to keep it that way. The smell is usually not too disgusting. It has a musty smell that is predominantly from the perfumes you encounter in soaps.

The last thing we need is for it to sit somewhere long enough for the anaerobic bacteria to take hold. We are expecting relatively oxygenated waste-water, so that with aeration it can be digested quickly with aerobic bacteria. If it goes septic with anaerobic bacteria, there isn't likely to be much of the bacteria we need to encourage for self-digestion of the sludge.

Oh, and one other thing: Anaerobic bacteria often creates methane. We'd rather such stuff happen in a controlled place, such as a sludge digester, instead of in the sewer mains. Flammable gas in the sewers is not particularly safe...

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Uberbah]

It would take a fleet of firetrucks greater than half the star fleet.

Nah, just call up Invader Zim.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[JoCat]

Then once the winter comes we're left with a bunch of angry radioactive gorillas covered in grease and trying to get out of the cold.

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. I think, for once, you don't need the winter...

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[jonaskoelker]

So that's how memme is formed!?

Re:Just another day at the office for me...

[xouumalperxe]

Dunno about where you live, but I've seen recycling points in some towns in Portugal that have a specialized container for domestic grease.

Re:Cowboy Bebop, Anyone? What about office

[davidsyes]

procedures? I guess one could recall the commercials of old.... "AT&T: The RIGHT choice"... how bout in this case?

Maybe refrigerators could be sold with fill and vacuum fittings so that a suction hose could be attached and suck fumes and fume-killers as a neutralizer gas (might or might not be toxic for people/pet food) to reduce the risk of deadly, emergent shit.

Two cleaning agents? Ammonia? Bleach? Probably.

[Ximok]

This just makes me that much more afraid of the sandwich I found in my hotel room fridge this morning. I've been here two days and I didn't put it there.

I dunno, lots of rotting stuff can make ammonia... of course, if the cleaning chemicals used happened to be ammonia and bleach, the person shouldn't be allowed to clean ever again. Ammonia and bleach will combine to give off chlorine gas, which will make a person expel their breakfast, amongst other problems.

true story from my brothers office

[InfoHighwayRoadkill]

My brother used to work in an office that was (badly) converted from an old bakery about 10 years previously. There was the usual large store/junk room around the back where stuff was just piled up until they ran out of room. Eventually they had to clear it out. Right at the back of the room buried under a huge pile of stuff was quite a large chest freezer. It wasn't turned on but it was locked shut.

They tried to shift it but it was too heavy and obviously full. This should have rung a few alarm bells but no. They busted the lock open with a crow bar and opened it up. Projectile vomiting all round the moment the lid was opened. 3 people taken to hospital. It required a very specialised hazmat / cleaning team to sort it out in the long term as it turned out the freezer had been used to store raw meat for pies and pasties and that meat had been in there for about 11 years or so. Did I mention the room got very hot in the summer...

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Walkingshark]

And the award for coolest anecdote of the month goes to...

If it were me, I'd have put that thing in a box and shipped it to Congress as a special gift. Everyone in congress simultaneously projectile vomiting? Nothing in the history of humanity would ever be funnier.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[commodoresloat]

Everyone in congress simultaneously projectile vomiting? Nothing in the history of humanity would ever be funnier.

I see this every day on CSPAN; the amusement wears off fast.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Just Some Guy]

I had a similar experience when one of my kids unplugged the deep freeze where we'd stored a quarter hog that we'd gotten as a present, and no one noticed for about 6 months. One day I wondered why there were so many flies around the back of the garage, opened the deep freeze, and instantly puked. It wasn't a matter of "being tough" or "strong stomached"; something raced from my olfactory nerves to the ancient, reptilian part of my brain which immediately issued the "purge upper GI tract" interrupt.

It was horrible. I ended up painting my nose and upper lip with Vick's Vapor Rub, tying two bandanas and a sweatshirt around my face, and shoveling out the re-frozen pigslush with a snowshovel. Neighbors from down the block were coming outside to find the cause of the stench.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[geekoid]

Impressive, I'm surprised the increasing pressure from the rotting meat didn't cause a seal to blow.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[andyring]

Wusses....

I went to New Orleans four times after Katrina doing relief work/cleanup. Same thing there, people's home fridges that had been obviously without power for months, were full of food and of course had been under water as well. We'd wrap them in duct tape, put it on a dolly and work them out to the curb, all the while the duct tape isn't holding and the contents are pouring all over our Tyvek suits.

Granted, we had N95 masks, but those don't filter smells, just the mold and such. Sure, the smell was anything but pleasant, but no one ended up in the hospital. I went into a grocery store 6 weeks after Katrina that had been under water twice. Yeah, I had my mask on, but there were half a dozen guys in there cleaning it up with just jeans and t-shirts. No projectile vomiting in sight.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[pwfffff]

(Score:3, Insightful)

roflmao

Re:true story from my brothers office

[catmistake]

It wasn't a matter of "being tough" or "strong stomached"; something raced from my olfactory nerves to the ancient, reptilian part of my brain which immediately issued the "purge upper GI tract" interrupt.

awesome story... and told well, but...

and shoveling out the re-frozen pigslush with a snowshovel.

why would you do that? Did you keep the deepfreeze? God, man, why?

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Dishevel]

Best comment EVAR!

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Just Some Guy]

why would you do that? Did you keep the deepfreeze? God, man, why?

Well, a younger and more naive me thought that I could just blast it out with a powerwasher. For those contemplating similar projects: give up. Seriously. It can't be done. If my wife and I can't scrub something clean, it's uncleanable.

Thinks tried and abandoned:

• Bleach (by the gallon)
• The power washer
• Comet
• Brillo pads
• Pounds of baking soda
• Pounds of activated charcoal
• Replacing the seals
• Disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly

We eventually resorted to selling it to my cheap friend Curtis. There's nothing he won't tolerate for a bargain.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Fulcrum of Evil]

maybe it did - the seals aren't that rigid, and that would explain the bugs.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

Or to be blown... http://www.the-joke-shop.com/showjoke.asp?joke=1891

Re:true story from my brothers office

[MrKaos]

quarter hog that we'd gotten as a present, and no one noticed for about 6 months. It was horrible. Neighbors from down the block were coming outside to find the cause of the stench.

I unfortunately had a similar experience. My parent went overseas for a month and their freezer (containing meat) broke down while they were away. Fortunately for them I came to check on the house a week before they arrived. Before I opened the freezer, it was bad, I couldn't let my parents encounter it after a London to Sydney flight so I took care of it.

It wasn't just the smell that was bad, it was the way my throat and eyes stung. Fortunately a friend helped me. We did it by each wrapping wet towels around our mouth and nose, we ran in the house, opened a window and ran out, yes we actually ran. Once all the windows were open we ran in the house grabbed a bag of meat (rubber gloves) and ran out of the house and put it in the bin, we vomited several times.

No attempt was made to clean the fridge. once it was relieved of the weight we sealed it up, let the house air and moved it out of the house. After lecturing my parent about not ever *ever* leaving a freezer with meat in it when going overseas they just bought a new fridge.

There is no way any person can fight that badness, except Chuck Norris.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[catmistake]

Well... I have sympathy for the torture you put yourself through... but have hope, because, apparently, the way memory works is we forget the really really bad stuff.

Re:true story from my brothers office

[Jared555]

Sounds like something for mythbusters to test!

Re:true story from my brothers office

[martin-boundary]

They did.

New Slashdot Meme:

[Qbertino]

"Throwed up all over monitor."

Thanks.

Re:New Slashdot Meme:

[thebryce]

I don't know who tagged this story with the keyword "pussy", but I feel bad for the guy if the smell was THAT bad!

Re:New Slashdot Meme:

[Dexter Herbivore]

It's "Threw up all over the monitor"... danke!

How does it even GET that bad?

[pluther]

How the hell does the fridge even get that bad in the first place? That's not just a matter of not cleaning the thing for a week.

Is this an old forgotten fridge in a disused break room? If not, were people still putting their lunches in there? I wouldn't want to be eating a lunch that had been sitting in a big pile of mold all morning first.

I bet that had an increasing number of people calling in sick in the months leading up to this incident...

Re:How does it even GET that bad?

[samkass]

I bet that had an increasing number of people calling in sick in the months leading up to this incident...

Either that, or they all had their ear infections mysteriously clear up through spontaneous creation of penicillin.

I can relate

[Anonymous Coward]

I once was fined $145 for "creating an unattractive environment in public" when I spilled some rotten milk... Let that be a lesson to you young folk!

Looks like someone there conjured up

[davidsyes]

GhostGeist or PolterBusters... Shoulda called RotorRooter...

Reminds me of 5th grade

[azav]

I used to stock thermoses with rancid milk to clear out class at Catholic school. Just let them sit in the back of the class locker for 3 months and pop one when you need one less Religion class to deal with in your life.

Re:Reminds me of 5th grade

[onkelonkel]

God will get you for that!.......Once He stops laughing.

Disgusting!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would throw up in the break room and make the piece of shit office manager pay for lunch that piece of shit

Vegetamite

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "Vegemite" and yes, it is an "acquired taste"

(best acquired in childhood)

Vegetamite... pollen level... OVER NINE THOUSAND!

Rule #1 Do not open the fridge

[Anonymous Coward]

My son has a business that cleans foreclosed homes. Their #1 rule is that you never open the fridge. During one clean-up the tape holding the door closed broke while loading a fridge into the trailer. The resulting smell had worker and onlookers vomiting in the street.

What no Dirk?

[gmerideth]

I figured I would have been a Dirk Gently comment in here at some point. Something about a lurking refrigerator springing forth a Guilt God...

Re:What no Dirk?

[geekoid]

I was going to, but I was stuck trying to figure out how to get my couch out of the stair well.

Re:What no Dirk?

[jbezorg]

Apparently, the God of Guilt died inside before being released.

Re:What no Dirk?

[Lord_Breetai]

I was going to, but I was stuck trying to figure out how to get my couch out of the stair well.

Remember, you need to pivot the couch.

Re:What no Dirk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, I had to resort to / in firefox in hope of a Dirk reference. Glad I was not disapointed.

Bad sign

[Jeian]

Our departmental minifridge is slated for cleaning this evening.

God help us all.

Does Peggy Hill work there?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know! I'll combine the cleaning power of bleach and ammonia!

Honestly, people who spray chemicals while other people are in the office should be shot.

fumes

[snspdaarf]

Acid fumes teach you that lesson real quick.

So does nitroglycerin. Unless you enjoy a headache

George Carlin is Smiling

[Anonymous Coward]

George Carlin had a TV show for a while aptly named the George Carlin show. I believe it was on Fox. In one episode he decided that the "repeat" directions on shampoo ("Wash, Rinse, Repeat") was just a there get people to consume more shampoo. He scratches his head while trying to clean a stench out of his apartment and the mystery "X Virus" starts taking over New York City. The CDC tracks it back to his apartment and forces Carlin to repeat washing his hair.

I for one welcome out zombie comedian overlord.

As far as I'm concerned...

[cmowire]

That's totally something for one's resume. It's a mark of distinction.

I can picture it now:

AT&T Research, San Jose (1999-2010)
  * Made things suck less
  * Shuffled papers
  * Almost got killed by rotten office fridge.

Re:As far as I'm concerned...

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me... The xkcd comic with "Died in a _______ accident" should be updated with "fridge cleaning" ;)
 
CAPTCHA: "vomited" - is this a joke?

Ammonia & Bleach

[Anenome]

I think it was when they began cleaning with bleach and chased it with ammonia that did the trouble started.

For the uninitiated: http://everything2.com/title/Mixing%2520bleach%2520and%2520ammonia%2520does%2520not%2520make%2520a%2520super%2520cleaner

"Exactly why should you not mix ammonia and bleach?

In a nutshell, the combination produces corrosive substances in your airways that cause your lungs to fill with fluid. You drown.

Household bleach is usually about 5% sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl).When mixed with ammonia (NH3), mono- and di-chloramines are formed: NH2Cl and NH2Cl2. These cause respiratory tract irritation, tearing, and nausea.

Worse, these compounds decompose in water to form ammonia gas (nasty in itself) and hypochlorous acid. This last in the presence of water forms hydrochloric acid and nascent (monoatomic) oxygen, which are highly reactive and can lead to pulmonary edema and pneumonia.

There are several ways household ammonia and bleach can react. All of them are dangerous.

Reaction type 1: Ammonia directly reacts with bleach to form hydrazine (N2H4, which, in addition to being extremely poisonous, can burn even in the absence of air! It explodes on contact with rust!

2NH3 + NaOCl -----> N2H4 + NaCl + H2O

Reaction type 2: Bleach hydrolyzes into sodium hydroxide and hypochlorous acid, which in turn decompose into chlorine gas and nascent oxygen (both poisonous). The chlorine gas in turn reacts with the ammonia to form chloramines, also very poisonous.

NaOCl -----> NaOH + HOCl
HOCl ---> HCl + O (monatomic oxygen)
NaOCl + 2HCl -----> Cl2 + NaCl + H2O
2NH3 + Cl2 -------> 2NH2Cl (chloramine)
4NH3 + 2Cl2 ------> 2NHCl2 (dichloramine)
6NH3 + 3Cl2 ------> NCl3 (trichloramine or nitrogen trichloride)"

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[camperdave]

Reaction type 1: Ammonia directly reacts with bleach to form hydrazine (N2H4, which, in addition to being extremely poisonous, can burn even in the absence of air! It explodes on contact with rust!

I know what I'm doing this weekend!

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Nohbdy001]

While the parent does an excellent job at explaining why one should not mix ammonia and bleach, and as much as I hate to admit (on slashdot) that I read the article, it must be mentioned that the article does not specify the chemicals used. So, we can't assume that it was this combination that caused the workers to need hospitalization.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[gordyf]

This didn't happen. The person cleaning the fridge wasn't affected.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA :

The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea. Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment â" she can't smell because of allergies.

From MyLongNickName:

The article explicitly states that the person cleaning the fridge was not affected (effected?) due to allergies which prevent her from smelling. Allergies do not give you superhuman resistance to chlorine gas.

Your post is informative, but I think you'll find it doesn't relate to this particular article. :)

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Gilmoure]

Maybe she's Batman?

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocket fuel?

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

OK... reality/fact check... yes, mixing those two chemicals does produce toxic chemicals, but where in the fine article does it mention that those were the two chemicals used. It does not, and you were assuming those facts (remember what that word means). Had the person who had been doing the cleaning done so, they would have been in the hospital themselves, if they were lucky (I used to work on a regional hazmat team, and have gone on calls for this very thing). No ifs, ands or butts (except for the ones on the floor from the resulting gases).

Now, at Fred... you should be aware that different people react to different odors in different ways. Sometimes, people cannot smell certain odors because of genetics, gender, etc. Sometimes, they smell differently and certain ones can stand out or be indistinguishable from others. And then in others, folks may get violently ill (such as when someone with Asperger's smells something which is a trigger odor). Some of this was demonstrated in some mass publication magazine like Reader's Digest some years ago with a scratch-n-sniff card. And BTW Fred... you ever had the joy of smelling putrescine, cadaverine or butyl mercaptin in a close environment? There is a reason why crime teams sometimes have to wear masks if not SCBA... it is to keep them from loosing their cookies.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[c6gunner]

Getting ass-raped by Homeland Security?

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

While you list the pertinent reactions, you fail at equilibrium and kinetics. You can't just say "A+B yields C+D. But wait! Then C+D yields A+B, even worse!!!" Bad chemistry.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[WebmasterNeal]

Doesn't bleach and toliet bowl cleaner create mustard gas?

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[ebuck]

You still don't know. The person cleaning the fridge could have cleared out long before the possible cloud of poisonous gasses. The cold refridgerator may have slowed the reaction down just enough that they were mostly unaffected as they left to perform some other task. Then others who entered the breakroom could have hovered out of curiosity and hunger until they needed hospitalization.

They might have used one chemical, perhaps even letting it soak, and then used another chemical (leaving to let it soak too). They might have been a nut, like a former college room mate of mine, and thought that the combined power (and toxic gas) cleaned even more so due to the lethality. Yes, my former room mate purposefully mixed bleach and ammonia to clean the bathroom (he knew the outcome and took precautions).

Just because the cleaning person wasn't affected doesn't mean that it's not the classic Ammonia and Bleach combo.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, what a lot of effort to explain something that didn't happen. The person cleaning the fridge was not affected, hence it was a bunch of babies crying because it smelled bad.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That was all very interesting and whatnot, but didn't really have much to do with the article? People were treated for nausea and vomiting, not asphyxiation...

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[npoczynek]

As stated in the summary, a hazmat crew was sent in. So yes, the people cleaning the fridge were okay.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[stypica]

We used to clean the showers and bathrooms with bleach/ ammonia in the army while wearing our gas masks. Our brown tshirts all faded to orange as well.

Made too much one time and evacuated the whole wing of the barracks, but hey, it got the scum off the walls:)

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

Dying?

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot! You taking that post seriously enough to write this reply is hilarious, not informative.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, you'll notice I was quoting info I found, which looked reasonably informed-- not citing my own acquired knowledge :P One of the greatest mistakes we can make is to trust info that appears to be reasonably informed *cough*. Fortunately, the question of who to vote for, or any other important decision, does not rest on the information I provided. I did, however, think it pretty damn funny that she might've pulled the ol' ammo&bleach foible ^_~ And it helps spread the word to /.'ers who are by-and-large men and who therefore presumably do their own laundry (because Mom can't do it right) and/or clean things :P And, as some noted, just because the article doesn't say it doesn't mean she didn't make this mistake. As others have said, it's not particularly likely, but it's certainly possible. Ce la vie.

If you read that page I linked there's even a story about a guy who was a lifelong smoker who'd made this mistake and inhaled a good amount of the gas. When they checked him out they found no permanent lung damage. Instead they found that his lungs were now quite pink, that the solution had stripped his lungs of the years of tar from smoking, ironically. PLEASE DON'T try this at home, it is merely an anecdote, and one I find highly unlikely! But, who wants to let the truth get in the way of a good story (certainly not an author like me). And, word is he went right back to smoking too :P

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[kauttapiste]

So, we can't assume that ...

You must be new here.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Sobrique]

Gassing people in the showers? Which army did you say it was...? I hear that sort of thing was all the rage a few years back.

Re:Ammonia & Bleach

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting ass-raped by Homeland Security?

I wondered if I should rate this as "insightful", but then again, I don't want to be ass-raped by Homeland Security.

Don't buy used refridgerators

[Skraut]

After the Cleveland Colleseum closed in the early 90's I went there for a sale to buy things out of it before they knocked it down. I was looking for a couple things, but specifically for a used fridge out of a loge that I could take back to college with me figuring they would be a perfect size, and at $5 how could you go wrong. Apparently they just simply cut the power after their last event without cleaning any of them out. This sale was about 2 months after that. After opening up 2 and nearly loosing my lunch, and passing a third where somebody had lost their lunch, I decided I wasn't buying a fridge.

bad.smell = AT_T + NSA;

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot more rotten things in that building than the contents of that refrigerator. The source of the smell was nothing less than the decaying corpse of the US Constitution. It was knifed in the back by two fascists named Patriot Act and Warrantless Wiretap and stuffed into that refrigerator because the NSA didn't know what to do with the dead body.

In the rush to emulate the Third Reich someone forgot to use the incinerator.

Everything was fine until Toerag came along and opened the refrigerator.

at leas t they save

[geekoid]

a couple of thousand dollars a year by not having a clean person do it regularly~

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

[thue]

Has nobody else read Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul? Don't mess with the god of guild living in the fridge...

Duplicate article?

[SnarfQuest]

Isn't this article a dup?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/13/1412254

The spotted jelly touches you...

[Liath]

Your vision starts to blur. You are Hallucinating! You feel sick!

Must have been chemicals

[snspdaarf]

When I was in college, someone left a fridge on the third floor of the fraternity house with leftover pizza, a watermelon, and about a quart of turkey chili in it over the summer. Someone else, possessed by his own moral righteousness, or because he was a dick, unplugged it. About three weeks later, we had a plague of flies. I found the fridge in a pool of black spooge with maggots in the carpet.

On discovering the fridge would fit through the window, I chained the ol' Jeep to the dumpster and drug it under the window. We then shoved the fridge, on it's back, out the window.

And missed the dumpster

The fridge struck an electrical box on the outside wall, and flipped, which caused it to hit the side of the dumpster, burst open, and land in our parking lot.

Nobody went to the hospital, but it took days to get the smell off our hands.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent a year working as the sysadmin for an elementary school, then three years at a high school. Some teachers are too lazy to carry their food to the workroom fridge down the hall, so they buy cube fridges with their own money and keep them in their classrooms. Unlike in other workplaces, the principal didn't have the balls to say they weren't allowed. I witnessed multiple instances of the following:

- The fridge will be plugged into a power strip, extension cord, or a combination thereof, causing the fridge to lose power when the teacher rearranges anything.

- They'll have a fridge, microwave, and several computers all sharing a 20 A circuit, since the building was wired in 1959. It'll trip.

- The barely-literate janitors will unplug them for the summer and keep the doors shut, unaware that the teachers still have them filled with something like yogurt. As the sysadmin, I know this, since I'm the one who has to clean up after the janitors to set computers back up--or replace scanners that they knocked off tables because they don't know how to unplug components.

We once had a planned power failure for tree pruning over the winter break. At the building supervisor's suggestion, I opened the full-size fridge in my workroom, emptied it, tied the doors open, and unplugged it. I think I was the only person in the school to do that.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[iroll]

You, sir, are a Real American Hero.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[pwfffff]

Damn, I'm not sure which story was better: the dude with the meat freezer in the back of a shed, or the one with the flying fridge and the maggot-carpet?

I know, mods vote!

+1 Insightful for meat freezer,
+1 Informative for maggot-carpet.

(Hey, it could work.)

Re:Must have been chemicals

[R2.0]

we were cleaning out our fraternity fridge and, while it had never lost power, it still had mystery packages. there were about a half-dozen foil wrapped packages, roughly the size and shape of a jumbo hot dog with bun. One of the pledges (what, do you think brothers would do this work? we were there to supervise)found one of the old timers, who looked at them and seemed stumped. Then his eyes lit up and he said "Holy Shit! It's Jebens' squirrels!"

Apparently there was a brother who would shoot squirrels out his window, and skin them and cook 'em up. The ones he wasn't ready to eat right away he would freeze. We were *this* close to serving them to the pledges for dinner that evening.

Good times.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[snspdaarf]

Nah, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[Anonymous Coward]

rent a friend, join a frat.

Re:Must have been chemicals

[R2.0]

"rent a friend, join a frat."

As anyone with a real brother can attest, they may be your brothers; they are not necessarily your friends. What baffles me is why anyone would expect different.

Your mother doesn't work here

[unjedai]

They must not have had one of those "Your mother doesn't work here" signs on the fridge. Those always work.

Been there, done that....

[macraig]

I used to have fridge duty when I worked at Quarterdeck, and one of my coworkers with an artistic flair and a wicked sense of humor sketched this cartoon of me:

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/VulcanTourist/OKCupid/HastaLaPizzaBaby.jpg

Just a reason..

[Paracelcus]

To knock off early!

We used to call them malingerers.

Confirming what consumers has suspected for years

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's true. AT&T really does stink.

And that it is a rotten company.

even worse...

[wooki]

Shoulda been in New Orleans after Katrina, there were thousands of refrigerators abandoned for months with no power. Bad enough to gag a maggot!

Fark

[Sechr Nibw]

Does slashdot get its news from Fark now? This story was posted there at 2:17 AM today. Of course, Fark linked the article from http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_ROTTEN_OFFICE_FOOD rather than Yahoo News...

Re:Fark

[chrysrobyn]

Hey, young 7-digit poster. Welcome. Yes, occasionally there is overlap between Slashdot and Fark, Reddit or even Digg. It's okay. You read it in both places, so obviously you frequent places that think their audience is interested -- meaning either you frequent the wrong sites, or this is interesting to your kind of person. Not that it auto-loaded the link... it only provided the description to allow you to judge it.

If you don't like what Slashdot posts, send in links to better sites. Find better News for Nerds, more gross News for Nerds with Desk Jobs or whatever, and send them on in. You could even be a Badass Link Gamer and rake through other sites and submit them to Slashdot. It's been a long time gone since this was the Hack a Netpliance and QueCat site it was when I signed up, but I've stayed through. I've since found Digg and don't need to load Slashdot more than twice a day any more.

If we're lucky, a crotchety old 5 digit poster will come along and say how different things were 6 months before I joined than they are today.

Re:Fark

[OrangeTide]

I heard it on the TV news last night, long before Fark and Slashdot got it. Should I be throwing a fit over who links to what because of it? Probably not.

Yahoo News is essentially an AP feed, popular with people who live in Silicon Valley (where this particular news takes place).

Re:Fark

[Lord_Breetai]

If we're lucky, a crotchety old 5 digit poster will come along and say how different things were 6 months before I joined than they are today.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

At my office... no fish...

[californication]

At my office, you are banned from heating up fish in the microwave because of the smell. I don't mind the smell, but the people who do complained loud enough that an email was sent out stating that you could no longer heat it up in the microwave. I wish they would send out an email stating that you could no longer fart in your cubicle. The lady in the cube next to me rips some pretty nasty ones, and I'd take the smell of fish over the smell of an SBD any day.

The way we did it back in the day...

[AnAdventurer]

Over at tage.com we had a keg (one of the small ones) in our fridge since no one brought food. You could have some as long as you didn't abuse the privilege. "Abuse" was sort of a moving target depending on the day of the week and the kind of project you were on.

Seems obvious they got a whiff of H2S...

[ockers]

H2S (hydrogen sulphide) is produced when organic material decomposes in the absence of air. It smells like rotten eggs. Actually it would be more nearly correct to say that rotten eggs smell like the H2S they produce...

If a sealed container of food was allowed to rot long enough it could produce noticeable quantities of H2S. All of the symptoms I read about were consistent with mild H2S exposure. It takes very little H2S to kill a person, so they're lucky that they only got sick!

I'll Bet

[Anonymous Coward]

a McDonald's french fry could have survived in there.

Kitchen disaster blog

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a blog with more stuff like this at: http://www.kpatroll.org/2008/11/question-from-loyal-reader.html

Hysteria

[John Hasler]

> It wasn't really the smell per se...

No. It was the hysteria. "Ohno! A smell! A SMELL!! A STRONG SMELL!!! Oh my god! We're all going to DIE!! Call 911!"

Re:Hysteria

[hosecoat]

> It wasn't really the smell per se...

No. It was the hysteria.

No. It was the rest of the day off work.

Re:Hysteria

[iron-kurton]

It was a hybrid swine/mold flu that is now attempting to transmit itself through AT&T's network. The bit about person having allergies is clearly a cover-up. It's the only explanation.

Re:Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

CAN I HAZ BLACK HELAIKOPTAR?

Toxic blood

[RepelHistory]

This brings to mind the case of Gloria Ramirez, who was admitted to the hospital and whose blood, when taken in a syringe caused those who smelled it to become physically ill. Several of the hospital workers who were near Gloria had to be hospitalized themselves, and the hospital declared an internal emergency (Gloria herself died shortly thereafter). While there are some theories about how the hell this happened, nobody really knows. Bit of a tangent, but TFA made me think of it.

Re:Toxic blood

[IHC Navistar]

I remember the initial reports of the Ramirez case. I remember hearing over and over how her blood had crystallized in the syringe as they were drawing it. Also, there were reports that she had tried to kill herself by ingesting pesticides.

Grease + lye == soap

[mangu]

You mix 16 parts of warm grease, 6 parts of water, 2.3 parts of lye, mix five minutes in a blender, pour into molds (it will not stick, it shrinks as it hardens) let stand a couple of weeks. Good for washing pots and dishes, never buy kitchen soap again.

Re:Grease + lye == soap

[Tycho]

Good luck finding lye as a private citizen in the US, not that I have tried to buy lye recently. The Sodium in lye, NaOH, is a better ingredient for making methamphetamines, than the Lithium Hydroxide (LiOH) more commonly used in US produced meth. Metallic Lithium is obtained from disposable Lithium batteries, add water and you have Lithium Hydroxide. When Sodium Hydroxide is used for meth production, the meth is produced faster and more efficiently than Lithium Hydroxide. I also shudder to think as to the amount of Lithium left in street grade meth made using Lithium Hydroxide. Lithium has a relatively low toxicity and blood tests are needed for patients legitimately prescribed Lithium to prevent toxicity.

Paaaleeese-Crime Scene Cleanup.

[Anonymous Coward]

These people are the ones you call for number two.

I know what smells worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mama's pussy!

Summer Quail

[howe.chris]

My brother in law apparently went quail hunting. They did "well" bagged 10-15 each. He put them in a cooler and forgot about them. Then apparently after remembering about them he just moved the cooler next to the side of his mother's barn (for most of the summer). Well my father in law needed the cooler and "found" it. He apparently noticed that it was full and did not open it but a little. He then promptly put the cooler in the back of his truck and took it to the trash dump. The trash dumps here always have someone there monitoring what you dump and making sure you separate your recyclables/brush/etc... The attendant was walking up to ask what was in the cooler about the time he just chunked it in the bin (and ran back to the truck). It opened and spewed its glory for everyone to see and smell. That attendant was yelling and gasping you can't do that that shite smells. My father in law heard "You gotta go get that!" as he squealed out of there. Apparently it was early in the day and the guy was working all day.

YOUR POST IS TOTALLY POINTLESS

[ClioCJS]

The person cleaning the fridge was unaffected. Did her allergies give her superman lungs that don't react to chlorine? Jeeze.

Great chemistry lesson, though!

Further proof

[PRMan]

Further proof that AT&T stinks...

That Smell.

[Neanderthal Ninny]

The song from Lynyrd Skynyrd "That Smell" is best represents this situation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjAPoN8qs0Q
http://www.lyrics007.com/Lynyrd%20Skynyrd%20Lyrics/That%20Smell%20Lyrics.html

I seen something similar to that last year when one of the tenants that moved out my parent's apartment and the refrigerator look worst than biological experiment gone wrong and I work at a biological research firm. At least I know what is grown at my workplace (at least I do an test PCR find out the things is) but is in that refrigerator can best classed "Wild type". The whole apartment ha a smell that would set off the gag reflexes of turkey buzzard and my parents refused to go into the kitchen and ask me to go. I brought had a disposable biosuit and mask from work so I had to clean up that refrigerator.
More interesting that what we term "bio-hazard" at work would be just "dumped" in the garbage at an personal residence.

What would you do?

[spun]

So here you are working in an office building, when you start to smell a terrible stench of decay and harsh chemicals. You have no idea what caused this smell. You then proceed to vomit due to the smell, but you don't know that it is only because of the smell. What would you do?

You got marked troll because you demonstrated not only an inability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, but a smug sense of superiority over those people that you can't empathize with. And then you had the gracelessness to whine about getting marked troll. Paaaleeeese.

Re:What would you do?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up

Re:What would you do?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are making so little sense I don't even know what you are talking about or who you are angry at.

Follow the thread, lady, we aren't talking about the office fridge anymore. Stupid people who don't know how to read piss me off.

Re:What would you do?

[spun]

Oh for the love of... I'm angry at FredFredrickson for being a heartless tool. HERE we are still talking about the fridge. Do you need me to make you a colorful PowerPoint presentation with circles and arrows and labels done in Comic Sans?

Serves them right ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Why the hell were they sticking with that rotten MsOffice which is not even standard compliant? They would not had this problem had the used OpenOffice.

Wait...

oops. Wrong rant. What a waste of a perfectly good troll. Sad.

Mythbusters!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else see the mythbusters where they left two pigs to rot in a closed car for weeks?

Apparently rotting biological material in an enclosed space produces ammonia and robs the space of oxygen due to various processes I won't pretend to understand. Gross.

Dude, I'm gonna hurl!!!

[kimgkimg]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRn5-LQCg2s

? Saw one of those before ...

[drissel]

Last fall, I attended a 6:00 pm Friday meeting at a busy (24 x 7) company. In the break room, a janitor with a huge plastic container was emptying the (dozen) refrigerators where employees kept food. He turned the reefers off to defrost. Another followed behind him spraying the innards with something and wiping down the walls, shelves and doors.

Bet they had some bad experience like this.

Bill Drissel

Office?

[Samah]

All I saw of the title was "Office" and "7" and thought this was about to be a Microsoft bash.

Bad programming

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

Silly hospital. Any good programmer should have known to run a garbage collecting routine =).

Mold ain't so bad...

[BlogTheHaggis]

...after a while it kinda grows on you.

A good laugh

[purpleque]

Thanks everybody. I haven't had such a good laugh in a while.

Unfortunately I cannot smell very well myself and so have not had the pleasure of experiencing these wonderful things.

Just give her a present..

[cheros]

Why don't you buy her a nice candle, one on oil so it can be on all day?

That will put the wind up her next time she reduces internal pressure, and you will still be considered a Very Nice Guy :-).

Ah, evil social engineering - the best kind. Whohahahahaaaa!

Maybe you need to try out a better brand polish?

[freaker_TuC]

Or try to prepare it differently, I love my meatloaf raw while others love it cooked ...

EWWW!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing if spores cause an infection- but going to the hospital cause you don't like a smell? I mean come on. Grow a pair, you know?

Bring on the comments about how so-and-so knows somebody's grandma that was so affected by smell xyz that something bad happened. Big whoop. Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.

And please, just because you don't have a sense of smell, doesn't mean you're immune to pathogens.

So much wrong.. must resist reference to idle section... oops too late!

When I heard about this, I said, "EWWWWWWWW!"
Let this be an important lesson to nerds everywhere. ALWAYS clean your fridge regularly so stuff like this doesn't happen to your office!!!

Mom owned rental property

[Cro Magnon]

And I think the smell from the tenant's fridge was even worse than the smell from their multiple pets! Luckily, I was close enough to the sink to puke down the drain, but as filthy as the kitchen was anyway, it wouldn't have mattered if I'd done it on the floor.

Where to get Vegemite in US

[Peter Simpson]

Last place I ordered from doesn't carry it any more. These folks in TX claim they do:
http://about-australia-shop.com/product_info.php/products_id/1576