With every passing week busier than the last, most students barely remember what happened the past 7 days. They may remember struggling to pay attention in class or whatever stressful exam or project they had that week, but not much else. However, students would be hard pressed to forget that awful smell around Moore Avenue and 7th Street.

Whether heading into downtown, going to class or stopping at the ELC for a quick bite to eat, students quickly became aware of the sewage line issue from the smell alone. Students had started to speed walk though the area long before the trucks showed up to fix the issue, even though the pumps managed to only make the smell worse. Many reported the smell as being “10 times worse than the fertilizer Facilities use on the flower beds,” and that only a rotting corpse could possibly be nastier. Even the frats after a Saturday night rager don’t smell as bad.  As the nauseating sewage smell permeated the air, students became desperate for a way to fight off the stench, leading to several unconventional methods spreading around the campus.

Many already carry around bottles of perfume or cologne if they feel the need to freshen up between classes. While more students started to do so, even more started to carry around cans of Febreze to spray in front of themselves while walking. Others took to carrying around fully lit Yankee Candles outside! Naturally, they made sure to blow them out before going inside; no one wants to set off a fire alarm. But those who decided they wanted their hands free started to use their heads. Several students were seen walking around campus with air fresheners, like the trees you see in peoples cars, dangling from the brims of sun hats and baseball caps. This kept them from smelling the nasty sewer smells without having to carry something that’s flammable or literally on fire, even if they suffered from limited vision.

Some students wanted to start a petition to beg dining services to increase their baked goods output, hoping that the smell of cakes, cookies and other sweets would waft out of the ELC and mask the smell. In the end, the only thing campus officials were able to do was set up some of their portable fire pits around campus and encourage off-campus students to do some mid-winter grilling. Sadly, the lovely smells of wood smoke and grilled meat only managed to combine with the sewage smell in a nasty way. One student, sophomore Sarah McGrath, claimed that, “this is what Shrek’s swamp would smell like in the middle of a Florida heatwave,” which sounds unpleasant. Luckily the problem was resolved and campus is back to smelling like it normally does and we can all forget that awful aroma. At the very least, students are now prepared to fight the stench if it ever comes back.