“Mark, what is that smell?!!”
“I didn’t do it!”
“No! Not that kind of smell…it’s coming from the laundry room…it smells like when the Diaper Genie was full and needed to be emptied.”
“That’s pretty specific. Let me smell it. (sniff) Ugh! It smells like a dead something. Something died.”
“In my laundry room!? What would die in my laundry room?”
“Something that was done being alive.”
“Great. Thanks. Got any leads, Dick?”
“Excuse me?!!!”
“Dick. Short for Detective.”
“Uh huh. Nice. Hey! Look at the time… I gotta go to work, (smooch) have a nice day.”
“MARK! You can’t leave me with that smell! What am I supposed to do?”
“Call me when you find it.”
“My hero.”
I did have a theory: Last week I hired an awesome company, Dryer Vent Wizard to come out and clean my vents. (Ha! That sounded waaay more fun than it actually was.) I thought maybe since all the lint was gone, an animal/critter/monster was able to crawl down the vent. I probably “cooked” it with the dryer heat! Ewwww.
I called the lovely people at DVW and told them the situation. They informed me (much to my dismay) that it was a definite possibility and had happened several times before. Double ewwwww. He promised to come out within the hour.
Robert (you get to call the man who cleans your vents by his first name) walked into the laundry room and stopped short like he had hit a brick wall. “That’s a rat! I’d know that smell anywhere!” Really? Oh, come on!!! I have a rat in my house? I would’ve jumped out the window, but rarely can you kill yourself out a first-floor window. Besides…I didn’t want to add to the smell.
“Do you think it came in the newly cleared vent, Robert?”
“That’s possible, Ma’am…I’ll run the line up and check.”
“Thank you…and please don’t call me Ma’am – where I come from, that means old.”
Robert runs the line up the vent and calls me back into the stench-pit.
“It’s clean. You see that? If there was a dead bird, there’d be feathers and blood on it; if it was a squirrel, there’d be squirrel skin and blood on it; if it were a…”
“I GET IT! The vent is clear. Thanks, Robert.”
“Yes, Ma’am…uh, young lady. Maybe it’s on top of your cabinets, I’ll take a look.”
“Thanks, I’ll grab my grocery bag down out of your way…”
I pulled the bag down and a million gnats and flies flew out!
“AAAAHHHHHH!!!”
“You found it!”
“You think?”
Inside my fancy, insulated, expensive grocery bag was a week-old bag of now-unfrozen shrimp. Twenty-four, jumbo, deveined $15.99 a bag, shrimp.
(Sigh…)
“Well, thanks for coming out, Robert. How much do I owe you?”
“No problem. Don’t worry about it.”
I gave Robert 20 bucks. He earned it. Just for staying in the room with that smell for as long as he did.
I texted Mark:
“Hey…can you cancel our dinner reservations for tonight…sushi not sounding yummy anymore.”
6 thoughts on “I hired a “smell guy”…”
Wow- you would have been better off with the rat!
Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry you had to go thru that. It was nice of Robert to decide not to charge you, but it was equally nice of you to give him a tip. Your story reminded me of a story I heard about a woman who wanted revenge on the husband who rejected her for another woman and he got to keep the magnificent house in the divorce settlement.. I can’t remember the exact details, but it went something like this: The husband got to keep the house but he wanted the custom made drapes left in it, so the ex-wife moved her furniture out of the house, and left some raw shrimp inside each of the curtain rods in the house. So the husband and his new “significant other” moved into the house, and the house began to smell putrid. Eventually the man & woman couldn’t tolerate the smell in the house anymore, so they moved out and he gave custody of the house to his ex-wife, who moved back in, but not before removing the putrid rotten shrimp and de-odorizing the entire house for awhile.
Ha! Good one, Maggie! I’ll have to remember that one!
That is remarkably gross and funny at the same time. I was really cracking up at Robert explaining to you what would be on the wand for each dead animal he found!
Thanks, Melissa…nice to know we have the same macabre sense of humor!
Oh my gosh, I had that happen with a chicken! A long time ago a chicken had rolled out of the grocery bag and into a corner of the trunk and after a couple days I would smell something whenever I drove anywhere. Long story short, after searching under and in the car, I finally found the chicken…yeah, it was magical 😉