How to smell really bad

This worked for the parking garage at my office and it can work for yours.

1. Round up a bunch of willing sea animals, like shrimps, crabs, etc. If there are no shrimps, crabs, etc. you can substitute squirrels, raccoons, and the like.

2. Set out a tub of old, warm mayonnaise and let them treat it like a hot tub for several hours.

3. After they get terribly, terribly ill, throw up a lot, and die, transfer the mayo, animals, and animal barf to a quiet corner of the garage near one of the air handlers.

Et voila!

I can't absolutely swear that's what happened at my office, but it's exactly what it smells like in the garage. In fact, we are assuming that some poor, small animal did crawl into some obsure part of the air handler and die. At its height, I tried to avoid breathing during the short walk to my car but I'd still end up feeling neauseated by the time I had the engine on.

Oddly enough, something similar happened in a house that Mollie and I rented a few years ago. The little addition that we used as an office developed a really bad smell and we couldn't figure out what it was. (Apparently, we had lived lives that were far too sheltered up 'til then.) Eventually my fried Russell happened to be in the house after a rehearsal and identified the problem nearly immediately. He and I walked around outside and found the area over the addition where a few discrete slate roof tiles had broken off, allowing small animal access.

I called the landlord the next day and reported both the dead animal issue and the hole in the roof. They promised to have someone over by the end of the week to deal with it (All together now: Yeah, right.)

I'd call every few days to no avail. Eventually as the corpse in the crawlspace dessicated (this takes rather a while), the smell went away. And not long after that we got some seasonal rains. When I noticed a patch of mold in a picture hanging on the wall approximately under the missing tiles, I called again and pointed out that water was getting into the house. And that as the house did not belong to me, it would be no skin off my nose if portions of the wall would eventually have to be rebuilt. Workmen were there by the end of the week. I'm pretty sure that they made no effort to retrieve the poor mummified little critter, but just permanently entombed him there as they replaced the roof tiles.

So I really hope that the building guys here find whatever is making the garage so odiferous and dispose of it appropriately.

And I'll keep walking very quickly to the car.