TIFU by calling the gas company to my house for 'a leak'

Obligatory 'this happened a few years ago' when I first moved into my new house, but I just thought about it today and realized how dumb it was.

It had been a few months in my new house, I live alone, but my parents come by every so often to help me with some house stuff, painting, gardening, that kind of thing.

One day we're working outside and suddenly I notice something odd. A clear smell of what reminds me of methane gas, or some sort of gas. I ask my parents to come over to the side of my house and see if they smell anything. They instantly notice it too.

I did recently have some plumbing work done where they had to reroute piping under the house due to roots and old pipes, so I was concerned something could have happened with a gas line.

I decide to call the gas company out, and within the hour a guy is in my yard with a gas detecting device. It's not picking anything up, but he also smells gas on one side of my house. We are walking all round it, pinpointing where it appears to be coming from. He checks my neighbor's houses- nothing.

It's odd, but he says can happen. He's considering if he has to call more people out, how to handle it, all of that, when suddenly I realize something-

Where did that weird flower on the side of my house come from?

I hadn't noticed it before. It had just been stalky growth. But it's strikingly purple and almost looks like some tropical pitcher plant. There is a huge patch of them now, but they weren't here last week. They've never been here.

I lean in and take another long whiff. YUP. That's where the smell is coming from. I wave over my parents and the gas guy. They all smell, and then we do a lot of googling.

Turns out it's an Amorphophallus (known as a Voodoo Lily), planted by the previous owners.

Apparently it blooms once a year, but only for 3-5 days. I had yet to see it bloom, or to... smell it. People say it smells like garbage, rotting meat, decay... I don't know why but I thought it smelled like gas. Or enough like gas to warrant someone looking into it.

So we all had a laugh, and I sort of felt bad for the gas company employee who had to go back and write up a report about a call that ended up with the gas leak being a flower.

My friend created a slackbot that goes off once a year that says: "Reminder: OP- it’s not a gas leak, it’s that plant." Because of that I've been able to determine that it blooms consistently almost to the week. I have grown to love the annual pop of purple pitchers and rotting meat and flies.

TL;DR: I called the gas company to investigate a gas leak at my house- turns out it was just a really weird plant blooming for the first time.