Remembering A Real Crappy Day

After yesterdays bad day, I decided I needed a reminder of just how bad some of my days can get. I took a look through my older published in Blogstream posts and found this one I posted on December 11, 2009. After reading this again, maybe yesterday wasn't as bad as I thought.

Yesterday I started out for my clients house and about 5 minutes away from home, the inside of my car started smelling rotten. Really rotten, the kind of stench that makes you breathe through your mouth and imagine you can taste it rotten. So, I'm thinking that mice made themselves a home in my engine compartment and I'm cooking the offspring as the engine heats up. It's not 20 degrees out there, and with a 20 mile per hour wind it was feeling like 0 degrees and I'm driving with my window open. I get all the way to my clients house and in her door before I find out what's wrong.

I'm in her home and getting ready to start the vacuum since she's all ready had her shower, she turns to me and says:

" Good Heavens! What is that smell, it's terrible? What do you have on your shoes?"

Me: "Eeew, I must have stepped in something, let me go outside and clean it off."

So, there I am in the wind with no coat on, scraping animal feces off my shoes. All over the side edge of BOTH shoes. I walk back to the car to grab some paper towels and step into animal feces in her driveway. Animal feces that I apparently brought with me from home. How else would I have been smelling that odor otherwise? Am I going to admit to that? Only if she askes me outright.

I clean up the driveway and I'm not smelling anything so I go back into the house to resume my tasks. Ten minutes go by and I can smell it again. So, I tell her I have to go home and change my shoes and I'll be back as soon as I can. She counters with a suggestion that I just check the bathroom and clean in there and go home without coming back. I'm apologizing all over the place to her, she's holding her nose and telling me she feels bad for me, but she can't stand the smell. I call the office, explain the problem and leave. Driving home with the window wide open because I can't stand the smell of myself either.

Bolt out of the car and there it was in the path between the driveway and the steps of the deck. The biggest pile of animal turds I've ever seen in my life, all nicely camoflaged by the dead golden brown leaves that were all around it. One single size 8 and 1/2 shoeprint right in the center of it. I'd say it was dog, only, it doesn't smell like dog and there aren't any dog owners in the area that allow their beloved pets to roam. Whatever left that pile isn't small and it definitely eats dead and rotting things. Which leaves me with wild dog or coyote droppings...errr...excuse me, I should say dumpings. Frozen dumpings, which is why I didn't smell it until the car was warmed up enough to thaw it out.

When I got into my own house and removed the offending shoes, I discovered the feces were wedged up into the non skid cleats of the soles. I got it off the ridges of the shoes, but not from up inside the cleats. I had to wire brush both the bottoms of my shoes and the carpet in the car. The car stunk for days, but my shoes were fine. I tried Febreeze on the carpet in hopes that the car would smell better. The Febreeze didn't work immediately but the car began to smell better after a few days.

The client didn't call the office complaining that I left a calling card on her carpet, which makes up some for the embarrassment I felt bringing that stench into her home. The supervisor didn't write me up for violating the "wearing of strong scents into a clients home is not allowed" regulation, so I survived.