The cleaning industry is a big one. In 2023, in the United States alone there were2.1 million peopleworking as janitors and cleaners, and an additional 836,000 as maids and housekeepers.Since the sector is so huge, it’s no surprise that individual employee experiences can vary greatly, depending on the nature of the role.Because of that, Reddit userPlshelpimstrugglinggot interested in the dirty stuff, and made aposton the platform, inviting these professionals to describe the worst thing they’ve seen on the job. Continue scrolling to check out the most-upvoted replies and reassure yourself that your home doesn’t look that bad after all.This post may includeaffiliate links.
The cleaning industry is a big one. In 2023, in the United States alone there were2.1 million peopleworking as janitors and cleaners, and an additional 836,000 as maids and housekeepers.
Since the sector is so huge, it’s no surprise that individual employee experiences can vary greatly, depending on the nature of the role.
Because of that, Reddit userPlshelpimstrugglinggot interested in the dirty stuff, and made aposton the platform, inviting these professionals to describe the worst thing they’ve seen on the job. Continue scrolling to check out the most-upvoted replies and reassure yourself that your home doesn’t look that bad after all.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Former carpet cleaner. I used to clean a lot of assisted living places for old folks. You got all kinds of people. One man got his carpets cleaned every 6 months religiously, paid in cash with exact change, and gave me a handful of cinnamon hard candies as a tip.I remember going into an older ladies place. She had never been a customer before. There were st stains all over the carpet. Pets were allowed, so I told her she needed to train her dog better, and I would need to charge her extra to treat it all and get the smell out. She replied, “I wish I could blame the dog.” She had just been prescribed a new medication and it was wreaking havoc on her bowels. She also told me she couldn’t afford to pay extra to treat the st stains. She was 80 years old and still working at Walmart. I treated it anyway because no one should have to live like that.
Used to be the hospice caretaker for my father with cancer, went from fully functional lad to completely deathly over the course of two years.Nearing the end, he was unable to make bathroom trips alone but also too prideful to always ask me for help.One of our worst experiences was a time when he had tried to get up to the bathroom himself but collapsed before making it, ending up both vomiting and defecating all over the floor with him rolling in it.Nothing more scary than waking up at 3am to your father screaming, begging for help only to open the door to a scene like that.
I used to clean more upscale houses, so I didn’t really see anything disgusting.However we did have a man with life size horror character replicas. No one warned me, just said they didn’t want to take that room. Scared the s**t out of me when I walked in blind.To be fair, they were cool. Just not while alone in a randoms house.
I’m a plumber, and we got a call from one of our contacts about a mentally challenged couple who lived together having issues with their sewer system. They were part of church housing.I arrived onsite and was pre-warned about the smell, even warnings of what to expect in the bathroom. One person said dont be surprised if you find a fetus.Luckily, no fetus, but my heart sunk walking into their place. They were absolutely lovely and didn’t understand how bad they were suffering.I dont gag often, but this bathroom was horrible. 8 months this bathroom had been sitting stale full of st. They had been s****g in plastic bags and throwing them into their rubbish bin to remove.Unfortunately, a 5-inch tree root had grown through the 6-inch boundary shaft. There is nothing we could do other than dogging it up. The church decided to look after and resolve the issues.To this day, my heart sinks thinking about this couple.
I’m not a cleaner, and I didn’t even witness the scene firsthand. When I was a kid, the lady across the street had died in her upstairs apartment. The only reason she was found was because her body had started to break down, and the fluids were seeping through the floor into the apartment below. What I did see were the police and the other first responders running out of the building and vomiting all over the yard. My mom had spoken with the police and gotten the story from them. This happened in a rural midwest town sometime during the 90s.
Worked in doggy daycare and there was this one white lab who had severe coprophagia. I’ve never seen a dog so obsessed with s**t. She’d eat it out of the trash, follow dogs who were going… Just gorged on it.Anyway, she used to eat so much she’d throw it up so it was a horrible runny mess that was one of the worst smelling things I’ve ever smelled.We eventually got her under control but she was sneaky. We called it Shomit and would have to unload like a whole can of deodorizer/disinfectant.
Not a cleaner, but my wife used to help clean hoarder houses. The worst was one where she had to scrap dead cats off the floor. Plural. Rotted into the floor.
My very first job was working at McDonald’s. You can kinda already get where this story is headed. There was a somewhat older gentleman who approached me and asked for the bathroom immediately because his wife needs to go ASAP. I point him in the direction and think nothing of it. Quite some time has passed and I completely forgot about him until he approaches me and offers me money and apologized profusely. He didn’t give any details but just continued to say he was so sorry and tries to respectfully leave the restaurant. I was a bit confused, but couldn’t accept any money because it was against company policy. I also naively thought “how bad can it be”. Let me tell you the act of desecration I saw in that bathroom was unmatched to anything I’ve seen in my life. I’ve changed blown out diapers before and those pale in comparison to the graffiti of defecation I saw in that bathroom. It was as if someone had a machine gun fully loaded with human excrement and unloaded it in the handicapped stall. Disgusted doesn’t even come close to the way I felt after witnessing such an abomination from a human’s r****m. And that, my friends, was all when I was making a whopping $6.00 an hour.
I used to clean restrooms at an amusement park. i cleaned puke on the daily, bathrooms were nothing. until one day i stepped right into the stall, there was a splat instantly. my foot went into the biggest mound of human s**t i’ve ever seen. i gagged instantly, hopped away to clean it up, took off my shoe. some got on my pants. it was the worst thing i’ve ever experienced.
I didn’t think I had anything to contribute until a few other stories dug this one from the depths of my memory.I had a friend in high school who came from a really neglectful upbringing - parents were divorced, he lived with his stepfather with zero oversight, and there were rampant mental health issues all around. We also lived in a very rural area full of farms.His stepdad worked long hours and was basically never home, but owned 2 dogs. These poor animals were just kept inside all day long, despite how much open property there was around. He never let me come over before, but had told me that he was scraping money together to fix up their basement into a separate apartment. Big stuff for a 16 year-old, and I was on board to help however I could.Even though this was at least 25 years ago, I can still smell and taste the ammonia that punched me as soon as I was granted access to their home. Windows were dark and sooty…(Narrator: it was not soot)…carpets just covered in mounds of dog hair, dog st, and plastic milk jugs they’d give the dogs to chew on. My heart really broke for all of them for having to live like this. It took a while but we spruced up the main floor. However, the basement was so much worse.We spent days cleaning more of the same out. Bags upon bags of trash and dog st. Swept the floors - more (powdered) dog st. Remember that soot upstairs? Nope - alllllll dog st. Everything was covered in that powder.We did get it all cleaned, and he did eventually build his apartment. Other than the sheer shock of how they all lived like that, the worst part for me was for 2 days after, every time I’d cough or blow my nose, it was completely black. We were kids…. we didn’t use masks at all for this.So basically, I was inhaling particulate dog s**t for days and blowing it back out of my nose.
My cousin is a hotel cleaner and was cleaning up a room after a particularly rowdy bunch of guests had left.The room was a bit of a mess but nothing too out of the ordinary. After she started the usual post check out clean up she found what appeared to be a piece of jelly on the floor in the corner of the room. Upon closer inspection realised it was most of a human nose.Freaked out and disturbed she called her supervisor, who contacted the police. As this was happening, a guest with clear facial injuries, came back looking to recover something he had left in said room.The police took him to one side for questioning before rushing him to hospital. I believe the attempts to reattach were unsuccessful.It had turned out that he had gotten in to a substance fuelled brawl with his ‘friend’ and in the commotion had his nose bitten off, not realising until he had partially sobered up the next day.
Cleaning a toilet area during a small event in an office building. Im cleaning 2 urinals as 1 guy in a suit comes out of a booth wiping his hands on some tissue. Looks me dead in the eye, drops the tissue on the floor and walks out. Didnt even wash his hands. This complete waste of human space is the most disgusting thing I ever came across during this job.This is 10 years ago and to this day I think of that moment as life-changing.The dirtiest however was an outside dumpster filled with operating room refuse (blood soaked stuff and god knows what else) that had been sitting in the hot sun for 4 days straight. The smell when I opened that dumpster was also a life-changing event.Weirdly the live-sex venue I used to clean was the cleanest, nicest location I ever took care of lol.
I honestly can’t think of any specific occasion, working as a cleaner you get desensitised very quickly. Like unflushed diarrhoea or st smeared on the walls etc. Grown men pissing on the floor. Grown men not wiping and not flushing their ps. I have learned to always flush the toilet before opening the lid.Dried vomit on the outside of toilets.What really gets to me is the disrespect of some people. Especially preteen and teen boys. Pulling out paper all over the floors, stuffing toilets with paper (and sometimes st) which you can’t flush so you have to fish it out of the toilet, pissing in the trash bins, wetting paper and throwing it in the ceiling so it sticks, previously mentioned st on the walls etc.At one school I had to have the teachers locking the bathrooms ‘cause the kids messed with me every single day and having to deal with that at 6am just destroyed my spirit. So they had to ask a teacher to unlock the toilets if they wanted to use it, I enjoyed that very much XD.
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Not a cleaner, but a paramedic. Responded to a welfare check, turned out to be DOA. Turned out the guy had died because of the swollen veins in his throat bursting, quite horrible death. As we stepped around the corner into the room he laid in, we heard the sound of a little blood wave splashing around because there was just so much blood. Not too bad, we saw worse but we also had this intern on his first day with us that wanted to get to know EMS and maybe join, he slipped and fell right into said blood pool and showered us with the guys blood. I never saw him after this call ever again.
Worked in a small hotel and the cleaners would chat away to us.The night porter called one of the owners at like 5am “there’s st everywhere”. The porter wasn’t an English speaker so the owner was like great someone’s trashed the rooms again. We would cater for a lot of hens and stags so it would get wild sometimes.Owner arrives and the porter is still saying guest ruined the room, theirs st everywhere. Opens the door.Human s**t…everywhere. on the carpet, white beds, towels, towels thrown out the window that landed on the glass canopy over the restaurant and all mixed in with chips (fries) on the ground.Owner checks logs and sees its a gang of four lads. The other owners and cleaners arrive at 8am and are like wtf. The lads arrive back for their stuff and when they get questioned they are like we have no idea what happened, our door must have been left open. The owners said we wouldn’t mind if they were blitz drunk and thought they cleaned up an accident but made it worse but nah, these lads didn’t fess up. They had to pay for the room to be steam cleaned and new linens.
I definitely have seen worse, but I once found a donut with one bite out of it in a toilet. It was a pastor who did it. I left a note saying, “No donuts in the toilet.” He then wrote a 2 page letter on church letterhead explaining how he did nothing wrong. 🙄Pretty disgusting.
I worked as a custodian at the college that I also attended for five years. Toward the end of my time there, we had a serial pooper who would smear st all over the bathroom walls and mirrors. The custodial crew even gave them a nickname, the “Poop Bandit.” And it garnered a small article in the school paper.They’d strike about once a week and this went on for a few months. Nobody was ever caught. I only had to clean one of the bathrooms they hit and it was nasty, like they squished it in their hands and just ran their fingers along the walls. It took over an hour to clean when most bathrooms could be cleaned in 15-20 minutes.On a tangent, the industrial strength carpet cleaners we used can work miracles on blood stains from occasional medical emergencies. We also used a blood and vomit kit to disinfect every instance we found since it can be a biological hazard.One final note, the literal st I’ve seen in toilets. How someone can push out a log as large as a liter bottle is still baffling to me. Have fun breaking that up with a plunger.
I cleaned my grandmas dirty old biker bar on weekends and more than once a guy puked mushrooms into the urinal. Puke on the floor vs in the urinal you animals.
Not a cleaner but I’ve got a story for you from my college days. During my first year, I lived in a campus housing, each unit had 4 rooms, 3 single and 1 shared with an attached bathroom. So, one night, my roommate comes back from a party blackout drunk, 2nd time, I mean two of his friends carried him in and put him on his bed. 2am, he wakes up, rushes to the bathroom and throws up in the sink. Not the toilet bowl, the sink. The velocity splattered the toothbrushes and the mirror. My boy then walks back to bed and knocks out. He left the bathroom door and light open, it was a hot and humid night, you can imagine the aroma of bile, half digested food and alcohol.I was forced to clean it else I was gonna get sick. The toothbrushes I threw away. When he finally woke up at lunch, I gave him the mother of all lectures and either he crashes at his friend’s place or learn his limits. Anyway, following semester I moved out and rented a house with some friends since it was cheaper. I eventually learned he was expelled 2 semesters later due to failing multiple subjects, some of which for the 3rd time.
Back in 2019, I worked for a company called Student Maid (college town in FL), which was a company that employed students/young people at a lower price to do residential or commercial cleaning. a lot of local people and businesses used us because they wanted to pay lower prices and/or support students working.anyways, we had a “contract” of sorts every sunday to clean this frat house that was based in a church (still not sure of what the deal was there), but one day I was cleaning the men’s bathroom and one of the urinals was literally caked in the most disgusted layer of ps, pubes, foam, chunks of something, and whatever the fk else, that i took a picture of it and walked out and said i would not go anywhere near that and would rather quit.
Not a cleaner but I had to empty the house where FIL passed away. Let’s just say that decomposition starts very quickly and that the technicians can’t take everything. It will live with me forever.
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My first ever job was a hotel housekeeper at Disney - a place that gets visitors from around the world. Whenever there were groups visiting from Brazil, Argentina, or other South American countries, they would use the ice bucket to throw away their used toilet paper - in their home country, their plumbing cannot handle the paper, only the solids.Never use the hotel ice bucket….
Did a house one time where a man in his 30s and his elderly father livedThe guy was huge and he had 3 little dogs, I don’t think he could get to the floor to clean it when they pooped or peed in the floor.Because among all the other mess, we fill 2 of those huge outdoor trash bags completely with nothing but old dried up dog st.There where spots we literally used an ice scraper to scrap matted down dog st off the floor, one room being so bad when we first walked in I thought it was really nasty carpet, nope just a old hair fill laying of s**t.Just would like to repeat, they were living here. We all left with sore throats that lasted a few days from beyond that house.
Story I heard in my building: we have floor heating. An old lonely dude had a stroke and died, falling face first on the floor. When firemen kicked his door three weeks later, they took his corpse to put it on a gurney. Face rotten flesh sticked to the floor and cleaners had to scrape the slow cooked skin and eyes.
I’ve spent the last month helping my uncle clean out his mother in laws hoarded house. The woman is 70 years old and currently in a nursing home. She can’t go home until the hoard is addressed. We found an entire closet full of al sex stuff. Strap on, old playboys, old al sex VHS tapes, a gallon jar full of condoms, buttplugs, and dildos with st on them. My uncle has been making butt sex jokes nonstop since we found the st 2 weeks ago.
Not a cleaner but i helped a friend renovate a bath room that ended up being so bad that we tore out the entire of section of house and rebuild it. Instead of having a functional toilet they let it leak on/threw the floor for 16 years. They would just throw toilet paper and s**t on the ground. The 4x8 beams that sat the house on the foundation were like rotting kitchen sponges. After this complete overhaul of that section of house ive hear reports that they are back to there old absolutely disgusting behaviors.
“Roommates and I started noticing one or two maggots..“Nah I’m good..
Not a cleaner but my parents bought a hoarders house and weeks up to him moving out he removed around 10 trailers full of stuff and when we ended up taking some 30 trips to the dump with full trailers, it was so gross in there the toilet didnt work so he s**t in plastic bags that he threw out the window, the kitchen was pulled out and there was mold everywhere, most of the things he had in the house were in worse condition than the stuff outside the house.
I used to be a motel housekeeper. The worst thing I ever came across was from a baseball team that came through. They had been chewing tobacco, and left half full cups of chew spit all over the room, spit dried in the tub, spit in the sink… Opening the door to the room, I was hit with a strong smell of spearmint, I knew something was off it was disgusting.
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