So, I rather giggled over this link, courtesy of Da Blogfadddah this morning, about a funky breakroom refrigerator, the righteous cleansing of which sent seven people to the hospital, and grossed-out everyone else within smelling range; I’d bet anything that some sort of air intake vent was within or near the area in question, and that was how everyone in the building got to share the experience. That’s how it worked but in a pleasant way, at AFKN-Seoul. Our microwave was directly underneath such, and whenever anyone nuked a bag of popcorn, everyone else in the building would smell it and get hungry; one person would set off a whole chain reaction of other personnel with the serious munchies.

I don’t recall the unit refrigerator there having a serious funk; unless it might have been momentarily generated by the Korean staff’s kimchee box lunches. But bless them all, Miss Radio Yi, Miss TV Yi, Miss Finance Office Yi, Mr. Pak, Yu Mi the Receptionist and all the others, even the Boot Odishi – they were all terrifically fastidious about all that sort of thing. Never any qualms or worries about the AFKN refrigeration, but I couldn’t say the same about the previous unit refrigerator, at Det 8, Hill AFB Combat Camera.

We had a nice little break room there, with a television, and shelves for all the little snack items sold by the unit snack fund; an assortment that was so varied and usually so well-stocked that frequently had people from other units wandering in to buy their candy bars, snack cakes, soft-drinks and bottled ice teas from it. Alas, the refrigerator often fell far below the standard held by the rest of the break room. Well, what can you expect, when there are nearly a hundred people in the unit, counting military and civilians, TDY visitors and all, many of whom bring a lunch and store it in the refrigeration? It is just one of the immutable laws of the universe that leftovers will be forgotten, that healthy bits of fruit will be forgotten in the bins, to grow mushy and disgusting, and that whole colonies of mold will stake out new territories inside plastic containers, and bottles of condiments will be abandoned, far, far after their “best-if-used-by-date”. Eventually, when people passing by in the corridor outside the break room could detect the funk from the refrigerator – which happened about every month or so – someone would be voluntold to sort it out.

This usually translated to posting a notice on the fridge, notifying everyone of the date, warning them if they didn’t remove, they would loose – then arming oneself with a large double-weight trashbag on the chosen day and ruthlessly dumping everything left into it. The refrigerator usually didn’t have much sticky crud stuck to the shelves or bins, so a quick wipe-down with Clorox and hot water usually did the trick, setting up a fairly clean slate until next time.

But on one particular occasion, the reek from the fridge was especially noticeable; it had a sort of grab-around-the-throat-and-squeeze power about it, and was reaching a considerable distance down the central hallway in either direction. Obviously, there was something especially rancid, simmering away in the back forty of the refrigerator – and just by luck, I was the one administering the monthly cleansing. Really, I didn’t find anything much out of line, until I got to a thick plastic zip-lock bag, pushed to the back of one of the lower shelves … and there it was. I knew as soon as I maneuvered it carefully out of the refrigerator and towards my trash bag, swathing it in another couple of layers of plastic, just for good luck.

Before I did that, I called in some witnesses – I wanted to make sure that everyone else saw it as well; an 18-20 inch long whole fish, head, scales, tail and all, gone impressively rotten, but still recognizable, in about a cupful of unspeakably murky fluid. Everyone agreed, looking at it and uneasily at each other, that someone had gone fishing over the weekend, several weeks previously. For some reason, they brought in the fish to the unit – perhaps to present to someone else – and then forgotten it in the break room fridge.

Well, no wonder the smell was so bad, that month, with a dead fish molding away in the back.