worst smell ever

The other day, some friends of mine were talking about the worst thing they had ever smelled. Probably because I was there. They all had something stupid like a recently fertilized field or something like that. My story is the best:

I was working as a painter for my local school district one summer while I was in high school. They sometimes ran out of things for us to paint and we had to wait until a construction/repair job was done before we could start on the next job. When there was nothing to paint, they would sometimes send us home. They always gave us strict instructions to go straight home and stay there until after work hours, since they didn't want their supervisor to see us playing grab ass around town or getting into an accident or somthing - anything that would would reveal that we were sent home early.

Of course, someone got caught not at work during work hours once and they had to stop letting us go home on the clock. So they gave us dumb jobs to do. Well, first they decided to just keep us at work and make us sit there and not do anything. We spent a lot of time playing hacky sack and eventually we got really good. We pretended that we were part of an elite group of hacky-sackers called the Paint Crew 5, or PC 5, and we created this imaginary world where we travelled the globe challenging the others in hacky-sack. We always won, plus we invented lots of cool moves along the way. I believe it was one of these afternoons that the "Chicago Rollout" was first born (only later was it incorporated into another imaginary game, also invented in college, called Crouch - thats not crotch, but Crouch). In the end, we were world-wide heroes, although egos got in the way. The PC 5 soon splittered into several competing groups, usually based on the friendships of the day. Naturally, though, the PC 5 led to us playing grab ass around the school. The one time we were caught, it was my brothers fault. He drew an elaborate flow chart on classroom chalkboard that explained how the principal was a dickweed. The principal saw it and got really pissed. The flow chart was very good though, and explained in great detail how the principal was a dickweed.

Oh yeah, the smell. So after the flowchart incident, our free time was severely limited. Our supervisers had to start making up work for us to do. Sometimes we'd paint the same room we just painted, that way our supervisors could leave (probably to play grab ass) and we wouldn't get in trouble. One time they made us clean up this pile of debris under a stairwell. It smelled absolutely terrible, but we had to clean it up - thats what painters do. As we shovelled more and more of the debris, the smell got even worse, it was absolutely foul, like decaying vomit. Eventually we unearthed the culprit : a decomposing cat carcass!! It was really brittle and substantially decayed, but it was clearly a cat by its size and remaining hair. This thing smelled so nasty, I was nearly gagging. The cat was removed with a broom stick, but someone ended up throwing it at someone else, and the body ended up breaking up and the remains spread around a nearby parking lot. Not fun to clean up, let me say that. That cat was definitely the worst thing I ever smelled. Or smelted...or is 'smelt' only used when the subject dealt the odor in question? whatever.