I went to Ball State, so I never got into the Indiana-Purdue rivalry, though I had a wife and a brother-in-law on opposite sides of that debate, and they were always trying to recruit me. Now, however, I find myself with empathy for some Purdue students:
Purdue University students are making some extra cash through a project that might turn some of their classmates' stomachs — by sniffing livestock excrement.
Students earn $30 per session as they take whiffs of a variety of smells collected from barns filled with hogs, cows and chickens for odor research being conducted by Albert Heber, a Purdue professor of agricultural and biological engineering.
“Typically they're farm smells — manure, farm waste, hay. The only thing that is good is that we are not smelling it for a long time. It's just a sniff,” said civil engineering graduate student Anuj Sharma.
At least they get to experience a variety of smells; it's not just manure. Let me now share with you the worst job I ever had. In Vietnam, there was a certain duty that it periodically fell to me to carry out. What you think of as a "bathroom" or a "restroom" was in that place an outdoor "latrine." It was like an outhouse, but instead of being over holes in the ground, the toilet seats were over halves of 55-gallon (I think) steel drums. Once a day, the drums were dragged out from the latrines through the flaps in the back and lined up in a row. Then, fuel oil was poured into the contents, and it was set on fire.
There was a fish sauce in Vietnam called nuoc mam -- I think rendered from boiling fish heads -- so pungent that it stayed in our nostrils for the whole tour. Imagine that smell blended with the odor of fuel-oil-enabled burning human excrement. It was more than "just a sniff," so you will not be surprised that the smell of skunk does not bother me at all. If there is an odor from hell, that is it.
Got a worse job than that? Hit me with it.
And have a nice lunch.
