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

[Non-Expert!]

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.

You sound like a super great young adult.
These are issues that hang over everybody's heads like a raincloud, as loved ones move up in years.
Chalk it up to life experience.

You said it is in your past ...
If these issues do resurface (hopefully not for many, many years) or reflection on them or whatever, care.com is actually a good start.

 

[The 3rd Hooligan]

Cat diarrea in a middle of my carpet an hour before classes

 

[Old Man Mario]

Cat diarrea in a middle of my carpet an hour before classes

I hear a spork comes in handy for cleaning that up or eating it.

 

[Crankenstein]

I worked crimescene cleanup for a month in my late teens. There was this lady who had passed and was basically "fused" to the floor. Luckily it was marble so we could pressure wash it, for the most part.

 

[serious n00b]

There was this lady who had passed and was basically "fused" to the floor.

That sounds cool as fuck

 

[DerKryptid]

Ex gf clogged the toilet

 

[Crankenstein]

That sounds cool as fuck

It was like melted candy on a frying pan. I guess the sun sort of cooked what came off of her to the floor.

 

[QUEENSVILLE USA]

My bf puked in between the car seats. It was an old VW beetle. Took it to the car wash and power sprayed it, Couldn't get rid of the smell. And not my bf now.

 

[White Trash Motorsport]

Back when I was at uni in a flatshare one of the other residents was a total skank. She flounced off in a huff after we worked out that a recent burglary was some pos she‘d brought home as a drunken one night stand.
After she left we noticed a smell coming from her former room, so went in to find out what it was. Under an old duvet the bed was saturated with diarrhoea and sat in the middle of it was a massive dildo.
Amazed I don’t still have nightmares about it.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

When I used to work at subway, there was this one night that was pretty slow. Me and the other guy were cleaning up before close when I went into the men's room. There was vomit covering the toilet seat and trash can along with a decent puddle on the floor

 

[Shitted Scaredless]

I would like to tell a story on my mom's behalf. I was there for this, but she's the one who dealt with it.

See, my mom's done off and on old people care. So she's seen a fair share of bad. But the worst was probably my great grandma.
I only came along on those days because I was young and you shouldn't leave a young shitted by itself. I used the wifi to trade pokemon. I got a Mew out of it. So there's that.

Now my great grandma, she was a cat lady and an indoor smoker so it was already a mess.


But this isn't about that. See, she had been on bloodthiners. So as you can imagine there was a time she cut her foot somehow overnight.
And so that day we showed up to what appeared to be a murder, with blood tracked everywhere, partially by the cats.
So her and my aunt who was also working, had to call the ambulance and clean up all this old person blood.

My great grandma? She only asked for her teeth

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Although my last post focuses on my first ever job, I'll share a couple of stories from the job I held the longest. One is gross, and the other is more of a thing that took place since that post.

At one point, the boss had surgery and spent several weeks recovering before she was allowed to work again. During her recovery period, I was tasked with running the office in her absence and handling whatever needed attention to the best of my ability. Thankfully she left me checks for the utilities and other bills that came due while she was out.

One day, I realize that I've never seen the bathroom be cleaned during my tenure to date unless she did it before or after I left for the day which seemed unlikely. So, I got what was left of the toilet bowl cleaner and brought a mop and bucket from home so I could clean the bathroom before I had to focus on month-end client work.

The bathroom floor was so dirty that I had to change the water 3 times because of how black it was even though the bathroom was barely 20 square feet (2 square meters) give or take. The toilet wasn't too difficult to clean on the inside. The bottom portion of the toilet's exterior, however, was covered in what looked like old urine that hadn't been cleaned in who knows how long. I ended up waiting to clean that until the next day when I could bring multiple pairs of nitrile gloves to wear because I didn't want to touch that filthy toilet with bare skin. When I was done, I think it was the cleanest the bathroom had been in years.
---
Near the end of my time at that job, I realized that our paperwork being filed haphazardly by the boss is truly an issue moving forward and that we have stuff that's way too old and needs to be shredded. She surprisingly agreed with me when I said point blank, "I need to be able to find stuff if anything happens to you" and allowed me to purchase a shredder. Long story short, my comment proved prophetic when she passed away about 8 months later. I spent the ensuing summer and fall spending half of my time shredding old paperwork and the other half running the business on an interim basis until a transition plan could be finalized.

In addition to finding current paperwork mixed in with unrelated paperwork that was years old, I found paperwork hidden away that was 60+ years old along with records from businesses that had ceased operating over 30 years ago. Given that my boss had relocated her office at least twice in her career as a sole proprietor, this means she brought old paperwork with her both times that should have been destroyed long before each of her relocations.

Also, I had a number of old electronic devices to get rid of including an old typewriter that didn't even power up when turned on. I'm not sure how I was able to discard it at the recycling center without injuring myself in the process because it was both heavy and awkward to handle for its size. It was easier to deal with the two antiquated Win98 computers that required proper disposal after I removed the hard drives so that they could be properly wiped at a later time.

I consider this one of the worst cleanups in terms of the time spent and both the items being removed from the office and the sheer number of documents I had to shred that should have been destroyed long before I even started working there. Little did I know what kind of a pack-rat my boss was, though it could have been a byproduct of her being alive during the Great Depression.

 

[potatofarms]

I worked crimescene cleanup for a month in my late teens. There was this lady who had passed and was basically "fused" to the floor. Luckily it was marble so we could pressure wash it, for the most part.

same when i found my dad. he fell down on the carpet and died with the heating full on and i didnt visit for several weeks due to a new baby. the smell never left that house.

other than that, cleaning up a spill of uranium chloride in concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acid. not as disgusting but many times more scary

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

This is probably the worst of my cleanup stories now that I finally remember it.

Years ago, I house and dog sat for my parents while they were out of town. The days went by without incident... until the morning I had to pick them up and bring them back home. As I woke up and went downstairs, I smelled something out of the ordinary and knew something was up. The dog apparently needed to go outside and couln't wait, so he left a trail of poop on the stairs. After asking, "Why now?" I let him out to finish taking care of business. Thankfully, the mess was relatively easy to clean up in short order, but animal droppings have always grossed me out; I blame that on the fact I once discovered a pile of cat poop the hard way while spending a week with my cousins when we were kids.

 

[Andthensomeguy]

Wow, some of you guys have been through some nasty shit, figuratively and literally.

I'm sorry to say my story is a bit mundane, I worked at a bar a few years back for a couple months and a drunk got sick and most of his vomit ended up missing the toilet bowl. Now, I signed up to be the dishwasher but I ended up figuring out that I was also supposed to double as a janitor, cleaner, bar keep, or whatever the Hell they needed me to be for the moment, and in that moment, they needed me to be a puke cleaner.

Naturally, I wasn't exactly excited about it, but I really lost any potential enthusiasm an "alright let's just hurry and get it over with" mindset brings when my boss told me that we didn't have a mop or bucket and to just slap on some shitty disposable rubber gloves and wipe the area down with some paper towels. God, I almost retched myself, I can still remember feeling the chunks through the gloves and towels...

Looking back, I should have realized then and their that the job wasn't worth the minimum wage that it payed, but I was fresh outta High School and still had the "you should be thankful you even have a job!" mentality ingrained in my head. I guess you got to put some people through the ringer a few times before they manage to learn a little self respect, haven't cleaned up another mans vomit since...at least, not for minimum wage.