Many years ago, I worked as a gardener at a school. The school had a 3-story Student Services building that was in my gardening zone. That year, the local grocery store made the wise decision to make a "pumpkin patch" outdoors in the parking lot, and as a result, the students stole HUNDREDS of pumpkins for WEEKS leading up to Halloween. At first, they were only yeeting a couple of rotten ones a day, because they carved them too early, so they didn't last. BUT THEN, Halloween came, and it was on a weekend night.
By the time I came in on Monday, those pumpkins were semi-liquid, reeking messes. I started by cleaning the sidewalks and the stairs STAT because the slip and fall hazard was HUGE. It wasn't enough to just pick up the pieces; I had to put that red puke sawdust on all the spots to soak up the juices, then come back later and sweep it up, then scrub the stain with an industrial cleaner and a designated push-broom to get the stains out, then rinse it all off with a mop bucket which had to be refilled on the first floor. It took me about four hours just to secure the paths around the building.
My shift was over, but my boss gave me overtime to finish the Pumpkin Project, so I started on the parking lot. This was where the biggest pumpkins had landed, and worse yet, they'd been run over repeatedly until they were fused to the pavement. This is also where the largest concentration of pumpkins had landed, anywhere from straight down, to about 30 feet out from the building. I got one of those dustpan-on-a-stick things and got to work scraping them off the pavement. Some of these pavement-pumpkin-pies had slugs feasting on them, since it had also been rainy the day before. I loaded the pumpkin carcasses, slugs and all, into a wheelbarrow, and deposited them in the walk-in dumpster behind the building. Fortunately for me, I wasn't required to get the stains off the asphalt, but I was required to do something about the smell. I chose Simple Green as my weapon of choice, and I'll never forget the combined smell of Total Pumpkin Death and chemical-licorice.
After another few hours work, I had removed all the pavement-pies, and had created a waist high, oozing pile of pumpkin detritus in the dumpster. This dumpster was shared with the school cafeteria and usually had a half-dozen or so slop buckets of organic waste, which was old food scraped off plates, and leftovers that not even the cafeteria workers or homeless shelters would take. It never smelled nice in there, but it now smelled SIGNIFICANTLY worse. Also, I noticed as I left that even the slugs didn't care for pumpkins that much, and has abandoned them for the much tastier rotten pork chops, soggy tacos, and stale donuts that were in the slop buckets, and were generally sliming around looking for something better to eat. Later, the cafeteria workers complained about this, but my boss was cool and stood up for me, because it would have taken me 9 more hours to pick out all the slugs before putting the pumpkins in the dumpster.
After a hard day's work, I cleaned all my tools and returned them to the gardening shack. I went back to the dorms, grabbed clean clothes, and hit the showers. While I was in there scrubbing furiously, I heard someone shout, "JESUS CHRIST, WHAT IS THAT SMELL?" and start gagging loudly. The smell was from my dirty clothes, and especially my shoes. I had become somewhat inured to the scent of rotting pumpkin, and failed to notice the ghastly odor of decay filling the room. While I was in the shower, I decided to just throw my clothes and shoes away rather than destroy the dorm washer trying to clean them. I bundled them up and put them in the dumpster outside the dorm.
The next morning, as I passed the dorm dumpster, I noticed a certain familiar odor, but I thought nothing of it. I got to the gardening shack just as the boss was opening it up for the morning. "JESUS CHRIST, WHAT'S THAT SMELL?" he roared, and started gagging. I had cleaned my equipment before I put it back, but I had forgotten about the gloves I'd been wearing, and I was so tired, I just stripped them off and put them in their cubbyhole. The smell was so thick we had to air out the gardening shack for the rest of the day, and I threw away the gloves and cleaned the cubbyhole with Simple Green. Even so, when we got there in the mornings, there was still a faint smell of rot lingering in the stuffy air. After that, I was on Puke and Pumpkin Detail, because the boss was impressed at my strong stomach. And frankly, if given the choice, I'd prefer to clean up puke, because it's fresh. The End.