What is the worst mess you've ever had to clean? - Cleaning tips are a bonus

[eternal dog mongler]

Thankfully I was never really expected to clean up weird shit.

I do feel bad for nurses who have to clean dementia patients with shit caked under their fingernails though.

Mainly because patients with severe dementia will grab your arm and press their fingernails into you as hard as they can. It's the one special combat move they remember.

 

[LordofTendons]

Thankfully I was never really expected to clean up weird shit.

I do feel bad for nurses who have to clean dementia patients with shit caked under their fingernails though.

Mainly because patients with severe dementia will grab your arm and press their fingernails into you as hard as they can. It's the one special combat move they remember.

The one my dad remembers is kicking you in the kneecap with his heel. We had to warn them in the nursing home and they didn't believe us until he did it.

 

[Rice Is Ready]

One of my friends was drunk off liquor last night and puked all over my bathroom and pissed himself. I just drug him out of the bathroom and called this girl up and her and her friend cleaned it for me. Then we drew dicks on him with sharpie.

 

[lurk_moar]

My hoarder messy bedroom before my big move last year. It was terrible. My room should have been featured on Hoarders. It took a like three or four audiobooks worth of time just to clean. I had so many large garbage bags full of trash and two trash bags worth of Goodwill clothing donations. I think I got rid of about half of my belongings, and I still have too much in my quasi-minimalist opinion. This is what happens when you are sad, depressed, living with mommy and daddy, feeling unfulfilled, and not giving a fuck. I spent money on stuff to fill the void in my life, now I have a career that I love which filled that big void.

My apartment is now very clean and organized thank you very much. Spending money on junk no longer brings me that five seconds of happiness, but hoarding money and paying off debt brings me long term happiness. Now I am afraid of debt. In March I will be credit card debt free.

I know that revealing this made me vulnerable and is embarrassing AF, but thank you for listening kiwis.

 

[Wraith]

My own life and the damage other people did to it. I can't tell you how many dimensions I had to merge...

 

[AbyssStarer]

Working at a grocery store, yada yada, the bakery department kept putting their trash in the day janitors' trash barges which were supposed to only have bagged garbage in them. I was good at doing the janitor job so I kept getting assigned to it. I didnt do it for 3 days and when I back to it one of the trash barges was full of old raw egg; yolks, whites, and shells and the back of the store stunk to high heaven. The lazy bastards who had worked the shift since I last had had just ignored it despite it being a major fucking health hazard and we would get in trouble if there was a surprise inspection.
What was the big problem was that both of the motherfucking utility sinks in the store were blocked off by machines that nobody in the store had jurisdiction over. So I asked the floral department if I could use their outdoor hose for it and they said no. I ended up having to dump the thing in some rocks on the edge of the parking lot and use spray cleaner and dinky shop cleaning wipes on the thing. At some point I did go back and use the water sprayer and a stronger soap on the barge, but I scrubbed the motherfucker down, lined it with a plastic bag like it was supposed to be and tried to catch up on the rest of my job since I wound up about an hour behind.
That was my last day in that position in the store and I had actually volunteered to do it since the assigned worker to the shift was a useless chucklefuck. I regularly tried to implement and pass on small things to make the job more organized, but my colleagues didnt seem to understand the simple principles of not jumbling together the smallest and the biggest trashbags or using the large bags in the back of the store to line the trash barges as defense against the antics of the bakery department. To this day I wonder if I should have reported the eggs on sight, but maybe even the store managers were ignoring it. They wouldn't have gone 3 days without going to the back of the store, they had to have seen it when they unlocked the trash compactor twice a day.

Working in a grocery store is a hell of a ride. It's crazy how inconsiderate the departments can be of one another.

 

[Goofy Logic]

Is that what that sticky dark yellow stuff is, that oozes out of the bathroom wall, and drips down, out of nowhere? I am trying to figure out what that is ... house built in 1939 ... it is not where you would think it would be, it is over above the sink ... Way over the "standing male inevitable spray accumulation piss line."

Have you thought about honeybees? Ive heard of their nests leaking honey after they are exterminated or abandoned.

 

[Midlife Sperglord]

The restrooms in Target on Black Friday.

I never want to go through that ever again. I feel like I deserve some kind of combat medal for staying on top of that for several hours.

 

[Slappy McGherkin]

What do you do when you live in PA, which never lowered or changed its 21 drinking age, when all the surrounding states now allow 18 year olds to drink? Well, you round up a couple of buddies and some girlfriends and do a road trip to NJ, of course! Jump in the '62 Dodge and head across the Delaware, where the sweet, sweet beer flows freely. And some shots, whiskey shots, because god-dammit, we're gonna get drunk!

Everybody is lit, stagger out of the bar and pile back into the car. Even though us guys had our "associates degree" in underage drinking, the girls did not. Bob is in the back seat with one of the girls making out as we head our way back to town through the dark-wooded PA back roads. 8 tracking jamming Robin Trower's Bride of Sighs. Then comes the sound. A wretching/spewing sound and Bob screaming "WHADDA FUCK!!??!? Oh man, she just puked all over me!" Wretching continues. Girl #2 now gets in on the action and leans down and starts ralphing all over the floor of the car. Chain reaction vomiting as one of the guys gets set off, as well.

They are like pull over, pull over, there's puke everywhere. Can't do that; we're in the fucking middle of nowhere, it's pitch black, two lane road, nowhere to pull over at all. Roll down the windows, even though it's freezing outside. We finally get back to town. Girl #1 is passed out. We carry her up to her doorstep, ring the doorbell, and take the hell off again in the pukemobile. Drop off girl #2, then I finally get a chance to assess Puke Lake all over the backseat. OMG, free-flowing puddle about four inches deep, puke everywhere, Bob is shirtless, whadda fucking mess, it's 3:00 am, fuck it, deal with it in the morning.

Bad hangover, Mr. Clean and bucket in hand, scooping out what puke I could actually hose down, it's seeped into the carpets and seats. The smell lingered for months, despite burning incense, spreading baking soda and rewashing the carpet. I think I could still get a whiff of that night when I finally sold that car two years later, never admitting to the atrocity committed within.

 

[Shield Breaker]

God this post reminded me of the time many years ago when I had to clean up my sister's rooms while she was out because everyone could smell rot through the rest of the house. She would absolutely refuse to clean anything herself, but wouldn't let anyone else do it without throwing a violent tantrum so we waited for her to be completely gone to start.

Here's a disgusting list of the cursed shit I remember having to clean: a dry blood clot that had seeped between floorboards and begun to rot, a bundle of decaying hair that had been annexed by a spider, countless bloody clothes, tampons, an unspeakably saturated mattress, piss stains from practically everything within a 5 foot radius of the toilet, vomit she left stewing at the bottom of a garbage bin, and more more fucking tampons among others.

She was furious when she got back and within a few weeks the stench returned. It took me a very long time to begin talking to her again afterwards, and after experiencing exactly how fucking gross women can be I'm surprised I didn't go gay. Fuck you for digging this memory from the deepest reaches of my brain, now you can share in the pain with me.

That reminds me of having to help my mom clean my sister's bedroom. She stuffed her bloody and crappy underwear under her the mattress of her bed. She never gave us a coherent reason why she did it. From the amount that was under there, she had been doing it for months.

Thanks for helping me recover that memory.

 

[Non-Expert!]

That reminds me of having to help my mom clean my sister's bedroom. She stuffed her bloody and crappy underwear under her the mattress of her bed. She never gave us a coherent reason why she did it. From the amount that was under there, she had been doing it for months.

Thanks for helping me recover that memory.

Is that reason mental exceptionalism? Or is this some kind of new-wave sensory art experiment?

I had actually volunteered to do it since the assigned worker to the shift was a useless chucklefuck.

Just wanted to take advantage of the moment, to use the word "chucklefuck."

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

One particular day during my first job as a hardware store's stock boy, a gallon of white paint somehow dropped and fell to the floor where it opened and spilled all over the floor upon impact. Instinctively, my teen self ran to the back room to get what cleaning supplies I thought I'd need. Unknown to me, some of the paint got on my shoes and I tracked it through the store on the way to the back room.

Luckily, the head of the paint department at the time was a largely-decent guy. He helped show me how to clean up the mess and paint spills in general. First, he cut the flaps off an empty cardboard box and used them to scoop the excess paint off the floor and into the box. Once that was done, he pointed out how it's important to know what kind of paint spilled to know how to properly remove the rest of it off the floor. Since this was regular latex paint, I believe he told me to mix a little bit of paint thinner in a bucket of water and that mopping with that mixture would take care of the last of the paint still left on the floor. He finished by saying that in the future, the first thing do after a paint spill is to see what's been hit by the paint to make sure it doesn't get tracked anywhere else.

 

[Dwight Frye]

Having to be the unlucky bastard that got chosen to clean the women's bathroom back in my retail slave days.

You people are fucking animals. Guys could leave the bathroom dirty, but it was a breeze cleaning that compared to the fecal tidal wave in the women's room.

 

[Old Man Mario]

Back when I was a young man working at a hardware store, we had an epidemic of old men shitting their bvds then cutting them off and trying to flush them down the toliet.

The asshole managers would send people they didn't like from the lumber department to clean it.

One of my buddies was forced to deal with this one day and was freaking out. I told him to chill out and hang tight. Went to the paint department, grabbed a paint stirring stick, and within a few seconds he fished out the loaded undies.

We debated trying to sneak it into the manager's office but he settled with just tossing it into the trash can but not changing the trash bag.

 

[Pargon]

My parents 6-acre property (mostly woods) after Hurricane Andrew. That fat motherfucker hovered over our area for nearly two full days and by the time he left it looked like a bomb had gone off and just sprayed debris fucking everywhere. It took my dad and I a day and a half just to get the fallen trees sawed down and moved.

Mother Nature. Just another woman, spraying her shit all over the goddamn place.

 

[Chan Fan]

That reminds me of having to help my mom clean my sister's bedroom. She stuffed her bloody and crappy underwear under her the mattress of her bed. She never gave us a coherent reason why she did it. From the amount that was under there, she had been doing it for months.

Thanks for helping me recover that memory.

OMG gross. You have my sympathy, that's pretty terrible.

My mom said that when my brother moved out (leaving most of his stuff behind) that she had to throw most of it away because of weird stuff like he would take plates of food (so yes, with food still on them) and put them in his dresser drawers. Not just on top of his clothes but between them, messing up the clothes. Worst of all, his bedroom was 12 feet away from the kitchen.

 

[Strayserval]

During the summer of 2016 my great grandmother had a stroke and my family being the geniuses they are, decide they don't want her in a home nor should they enlist the help of a nurse no they want me to spend three months with her at her house.

Not too bad i love my grandma to death it can't be that hard to take care of a old lady for a few weeks, well let me tell you something i didn't understand the severity of her condition and my family did not fill me in on what all she would need not only is she diabetic and needs insulin shots or she'll die but she's bedridden and needs a diaper and let me tell you something there is nothing worse in this world then changing an old ladies nappy of having to pick her up and wheel her to the bathroom in the middle of summer and to compound all of this her stroke had closed her esophagus just enough that she would need a special type of food.

It was this odd brown soup that smelled somewhat like caramel and rice pudding and she would sometimes spill it which tested my fucking nerve to no end but that's about as bad as it would get other than that it was a lot of watching TV with her which i can only say i've grown a new appreciation for old westerns and M.A.S.H. after like 2 months of this my family finally caved and get her a permanent residents at an old folks home i still love her a tone but i still have no idea why they thought it was okay to just not get her professionnel help for months.

 

[Shield Breaker]

Is that reason mental exceptionalism? Or is this some kind of new-wave sensory art experiment?

My sister doesn't have an actual mental illness, but if she was on the site, she'd definitely be a horror cow. After my mom's death, I cut off all contact with her.

 

[Non-Expert!]

During the summer of 2016 my great grandmother had a stroke and my family being the geniuses they are, decide they don't want her in a home nor should they enlist the help of a nurse no they want me to spend three months with her at her house.

Not too bad i love my grandma to death it can't be that hard to take care of a old lady for a few weeks, well let me tell you something i didn't understand the severity of her condition and my family did not fill me in on what all she would need not only is she diabetic and needs insulin shots or she'll die but she's bedridden and needs a diaper and let me tell you something there is nothing worse in this world then changing an old ladies nappy of having to pick her up and wheel her to the bathroom in the middle of summer and to compound all of this her stroke had closed her esophagus just enough that she would need a special type of food.

It was this odd brown soup that smelled somewhat like caramel and rice pudding and she would sometimes spill it which tested my fucking nerve to no end but that's about as bad as it would get other than that it was a lot of watching TV with her which i can only say i've grown a new appreciation for old westerns and M.A.S.H. after like 2 months of this my family finally caved and get her a permanent residents at an old folks home i still love her a tone but i still have no idea why they thought it was okay to just not get her professionnel help for months.

There are multiple issues here.

Spoiler: One Possible Angle

Because if you have the great fortune to be born into such an illustrious clan, that is what family is for. Literally dumping shit on the designated "voluntold" in the name of love. And then either imagining up a childish explanation instead of facing the harsh realities of illness, death and dying, or pretending not to know, are convenient ways to avoid all responsibility.

Spoiler: Another answer to the question

And dispatching your late adolescent son, daughter or grandkid, is a way of feeling good that you are solving the problem without getting your own hands dirty, and not making any financial sacrifices. And not smelling the crap and mopping up drool, in your own house.

Obviously I don't know your family or you. But if you live in the United States, putting Grandma in a home is a huge financial sacrifice. Many scenarios come into play depending on the type of insurance, the diagnosis, stage, Grandma's assets, family's collective assets. and the state and county of residence.

From a financial standpoint, it obviously makes sense to send out great grand kid to change diapers and dispense insulin and babysit 24 hours a day. Because chances are, if anybody outside the family is maintaining her like that, they will lose her house which is their inheritance.

If this is a great grandmother, her children (your grandparents) want to (finally) inherit her property, but don't want to risk breaking their hips or backs while slipping on water from the shower. They don't want the backache of carrying mom around and positioning her for adult diaper changes. This is professional paid labor for a reason. They are called "home health aids."

Your parents and all the other aunts and uncles probably are too busy. They are generally, and understandably, always too busy. And people in their late 40s, 50's and early 60s also fear form the risks of falling. So your parent's want to seem like the heroes to their parents (your grandparents) and come up with this brilliant solution. This avoids all tension with any siblings they have (as NOBODY wants the job, but everybody knows that they should do their share) and amazingly finances are saved.

We're you trained to be a home health aid? Unfortunately they put both you and gramma in danger there, on so many levels. And If the old lady wandered off, amazingly they could wash their hands of it and say that she was entrusted to you ...

This thread is particularly interesting because most of the folks answering are either young people who recently faced an overwhelmingly dirty job, or older people looking back thinking back to when ...

Spoiler: #3

The realities are, issues involving families and people's motivations are always something of a tangle. Some folks think that it is their "duty" to take care of the elderly, as in wipe their asses and maintain 24 hour vigil over them, until they die. And they have this sense of guilt, so they say that well, the kids can do it. Never mind that you need to get your OWN life in order and you can also get injured, for life.

But that biblical mandate, reinterpreted and passed down thru generations, did not take into account, that people are kept alive like this, in some cases, for decades. Also, the pressures of today's world, such as your own parents being mid-career, and your grandparents being elderly themselves, make such well-intended ideas, unsustainable for today's lifestyle.

Thing is, a lot of these dirty assignments would have been a lot less dangerous and overwhelming, had they and the folks surrounding them more information about the hazards of the job, and the limitations of the person assigned to it.

 

[Strayserval]

There are multiple issues here.

Spoiler: One Possible Angle

Because if you have the great fortune to be born into such an illustrious clan, that is what family is for. Literally dumping shit on the designated "voluntold" in the name of love. And then either imagining up a childish explanation instead of facing the harsh realities of illness, death and dying, or pretending not to know, are convenient ways to avoid all responsibility.

Spoiler: Another answer to the question

And dispatching your late adolescent son, daughter or grandkid, is a way of feeling good that you are solving the problem without getting your own hands dirty, and not making any financial sacrifices. And not smelling the crap and mopping up drool, in your own house.

Obviously I don't know your family or you. But if you live in the United States, putting Grandma in a home is a huge financial sacrifice. Many scenarios come into play depending on the type of insurance, the diagnosis, stage, Grandma's assets, family's collective assets. and the state and county of residence.

From a financial standpoint, it obviously makes sense to send out great grand kid to change diapers and dispense insulin and babysit 24 hours a day. Because chances are, if anybody outside the family is maintaining her like that, they will lose her house which is their inheritance.

If this is a great grandmother, her children (your grandparents) want to (finally) inherit her property, but don't want to risk breaking their hips or backs while slipping on water from the shower. They don't want the backache of carrying mom around and positioning her for adult diaper changes. This is professional paid labor for a reason. They are called "home health aids."

Your parents and all the other aunts and uncles probably are too busy. They are generally, and understandably, always too busy. And people in their late 40s, 50's and early 60s also fear form the risks of falling. So your parent's want to seem like the heroes to their parents (your grandparents) and come up with this brilliant solution. This avoids all tension with any siblings they have (as NOBODY wants the job, but everybody knows that they should do their share) and amazingly finances are saved.

We're you trained to be a home health aid? Unfortunately they put both you and gramma in danger there, on so many levels. And If the old lady wandered off, amazingly they could wash their hands of it and say that she was entrusted to you ...

This thread is particularly interesting because most of the folks answering are either young people who recently faced an overwhelmingly dirty job, or older people looking back thinking back to when ...

Spoiler: #3

The realities are, issues involving families and people's motivations are always something of a tangle. Some folks think that it is their "duty" to take care of the elderly, as in wipe their asses and maintain 24 hour vigil over them, until they die. And they have this sense of guilt, so they say that well, the kids can do it. Never mind that you need to get your OWN life in order and you can also get injured, for life.

But that biblical mandate, reinterpreted and passed down thru generations, did not take into account, that people are kept alive like this, in some cases, for decades. Also, the pressures of today's world, such as your own parents being mid-career, and your grandparents being elderly themselves, make such well-intended ideas, unsustainable for today's lifestyle.

Thing is, a lot of these dirty assignments would have been a lot less dangerous and overwhelming, had they and the folks surrounding them more information about the hazards of the job, and the limitations of the person assigned to it.

Faire enough i guess i'll go into a bit more detail it wasn't a money thing and i lost time to find a better job for myself, not that i would have said no you can't really say no to your grandmother it's mainly just that they didn't tell me upfront that she didn't have a nurse coming for two months and they never specified why.

But it's in the past now and i just wanted to share thanks for taking your time to reply.