What is the most disgusting mess you ever had to clean up?

wet dog shit and throw-up when the dog is ill.

On my last day as a teenage employee of Mickey D’s, I had to clean up a corner booth in the seating area where a developmentally-disabled young man had tossed up his meal and shat himself. :(

Ten years later the thought still grosses me out. I can’t imagine why you’d want to hear about it.

I’m with Jeruba on this one. I worked in a hospital and sat with often quite ill patients. The body is capable of producing things far more gross that feces . . . I’m kicking off my gag reflex just thinking about it.

@Jeruba It helps to think of things that could be worse. Also, I am just curious… sorry to stir up bad memories!

You do not want to know.

I worked at a BBQ restaurant. They had huge rotisserie smokers that had racks and went around like a ferris wheel. All the juices, meat that fell of the racks and everything else piled up in the bottom. I had to take the racks out, scrape the gunk off, soak in degreaser in trash cans then hose off. The actual smoker you hooked up a hose to a valve in the bottom. You drained the grease. Sometimes a rib or wing would clog up the drain so you had to climb in the smoker and unclog it with your hand. After it is drained of most of the liquids you use a square nose shovel and scoop all the solid stuff off the bottom of the smoker. Then you scrape and degrease then rinse the whole smoker. This job got doled out for punishment for being late to work and other things.

As a mom and a pet owner as well as a biologist and the caretaker of a disabled husband and an emotionally disturbed son, I have dealt with a number of disgusting messes of one sort or another over the years. In fact, some days I think I have a mop permanently attached to my right hand and no sense of smell left at all.

However, the thing I hate to clean up most is a large volume of blood. This is more to do with why the blood is there rather than the fact that it is blood.

It is worse if it has been there for a while.

Wow, you guys were right, bad question. Turns out I didn’t want to know.

I worked at Long John Silver’s in high school. One day two women came in with a baby and ordered milk and fish for it while mentionint it hadn’t been feeling well. Baby barfed up milk and fish all over the table, floor, bay window, high chair… you name it.

They got up and moved to the next table and watched me clean it up while trying not to throw up from the smell. They left me a $1 tip, which I found beyond insulting.

I’m a nurse. PLEASE don’t ask ;)

Rotting grain in the basement of a grain elevator. Makes pig sh$% smell good.

This is an easy one for me. My daughter puked up nearly a whole can of Spaghettios one night in her crib. The smell was horrific. It was in her hair, all over her pajamas, sheets, the floor—and this was in the middle of the night when I wasn’t even really awake. Not as gross as the other answers, thank God.

It was the first and last time I fed a kid Spaghettios. For the record, she had a stomach virus and the Spaghettios weren’t the cause of the puking.

@wildpotato, just know it could be worse. For instance, consider the messes that you have cleaned up and then add that you are three days out of surgery, so weak that you can’t walk down the hall without support or take a shower without hanging onto the stall to rest once a minute, and can’t bend in the middle. Then be alone in the house with a sick pet and have to clean up an unspeakable liquid mess covering more than a square yard of floor. That would be me. Thanks for the memories.

Dead bodies, especially if they have been there a while. Of course, I haven’t had to clean up any human ones, but there have been others.

Chill out @Jeruba, I already apologized. Maybe choose not to answer if you’d rather not talk about it?

This isn’t as bad as the others, but here goes.
I had a puppy that we kept in a kennel in the bedroom at night and moved into the living room during the day, The kennel wasn’t closed at night, he just liked sleeping in it. Unknown to me, he had gone out in the hallway and had diarrhea. Next morning, I wake up and drag the kennel through it to the living room.
I had smeared poop all down the hall into the living room, effectively grinding it into my shag carpet.

A few months ago my daughter was ill and vomitted at least once a day for a week. She never made it to the toilet so it always ended up on her clothing, the carpet, her blanket and her toys that were nearby.

The worst part about it was that our washing machine was on the fritz. We had to go to the laundromat every day to get her things cleaned and all the towels that we used to clean up the mess.

@Darwin Ok, I’m getting concerned about blood and dead bodies. Please don’t explain. I don’t want to be a witness.

The worst was putting my left hand and arm down the toilet to clear a blockage (it had not been flushed). The cause was a toy my daughter dropped in the bowl. Why didn’t I call a plumber? we were broke at the time.

I work at a pizzeria, and there have been some pretty nasty messes, but my apartment, with two pretty disgusting roommates, was probably the worst. I tried to get the messiest one to get to a point where she couldn’t handle it, but when I got back from spring break and dishes had been sitting for more than three weeks and there was dried guacamole on the floor and the bathroom was a disaster zone…

How could I forget this?? Right after my daughter got out of her crib and into a toddler bed, I was sitting in the living room and smelled something. I thought, “Oh God, is that me?” lol

I heard, “Mommy” in the tiniest little voice and walked down the hall to her room. The closer I got, the worse it got. I walked in and turned on the light. She had spread shit everywhere. On the wall (textured, btw), on the bed and smooshed on top of her CD player. Then I think she realized what she had done and tried to clean up by wiping her hands on the carpet. I scrubbed the walls and carpet, cleaned up the bed and cleaned out the CD player while my husband gave her a bath.

I was so mad because she was old enough to know better, but I felt kind of sorry for her because she looked so embarrassed and ashamed.

@wildpotato, no apology needed. You wondered how it could be worse because that might make you feel better about it. My answer is that it could be worse if you yourself were disabled or debilitated while having to cope with the mess. If you were not, then you have something to be thankful for.

@chyna – I have had an interesting life, including being the caretaker of a disabled husband, being the parent of a bipolar child with anger issues, lots of animal care (not always of mammals), living in Miami during the height of the Colombian drug wars, and hanging out with a best friend who was a private investigator.

@Darwin From previous posts, I gathered you had an interesting life, and a very full one. I just didn’t realize it included dead bodies. I would love to be friends with a private investigator. That would be fun. Does he/she need new friends?

@chyna – Unfortunately she is dead, but you could maybe track her down in the after life. She believed firmly in the ability of the dead and the living to communicate. She said she got messages from her policeman fiance frequently after he was fatally shot during a traffic stop.

@Jeruba I must have misunderstood the intent behind “Thanks for the memories.” From the context of the rest of your note I understood it to be sarcastic, which would indicate that you were in fact not thankful to have had those memories stirred up. I took issue with that apparently sarcastic remark because, as I pointed out, this was after I had already apologized for stirring up bad memories, and sarcasm is quid nominis hostile. I had no problem with any other part of your response.

A little ironic, @wildpotato, not intentionally hostile. That’s a bit too black-and-white for me. I supplied further particulars because you explained why you had asked. Knowing about something worse would help? Ok, I’ll help.

i still feel pukish when i remember it..i had rented a new house which had a lot of plants and trees and grass growing around it. i liked it at first instant. after sometime i noticed that the house was full of lizards and ants, termites and stuff close to nature.
we got a pesticide service called in and thats when it got gross.
the next morning the whole floor of the ENTIRE house was covered with black ants. i couldnt see the floor(which was white marble) as it was covered with dead black ants. but thats not the real disgusting part.
a had assembled a new computer which i kept on the floor(the CPU). after a few days a horrid smell caught my attention. yes u guessed it. a lizard had died inside of the system and it was stuck to the inner walls of the system with its tail hanging out. YUCK! it was stuck so badly i had to use m hands(gloves) to scrape it out. YUCK!
i think i’ll puke again..

Dead animals.
liqui-dog

Years ago (before carseats and seat belts were manditory) I was pregnant and riding as a passanger down the freeway, holding my 2 year old daughter in my lap. She threw up in the worst way all over me! It was so bad that I stripped naked right there on the freeway and changed my clothes from the Laundry in the trunk.

I also worked as a nurses aide while in High School. Changing adult cloth diapers. Enough said.
@Supacase; My son used to poop and smear all the time. I forgot about that one.

So thrilled we never had a poop-and-smearer in the house.

My dog rolled in pig shit while traveling across the country, we were at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere. We cleaned her up as well as we could, but she still had to get in the car….

Ooh, I never wanted to remember these two, but somebody prompted me. I’m not sure which is worse, and they were around the same time at the homes of two sisters.

#1. On a visit to a southern town, a female friend was getting married, and we were honored guests. Lucky us, we got to stay in the brides apartment while she stayed at her groom’s mother’s house. Apparently, she had not been staying at her apartment for a couple months, so she rushed home to clean the day before we arrived. We found the apartment after the plane landed, and it was already dark. We were exhausted after a day of travel and wanted to hop straight into bed. Upon opening the door, the lights didn’t work. There was a flashlight nearby, so we were able to find a lamp inside. After turning it on, the floor and walls came alive. The roaches and other critters scurried for the dark, but there wasn’t enough room for them all, so a few stayed running around, which made them easy targets for our shoes. There was so much filth, we couldn’t stand to be in the place. We found garbage bags, and filled many of them. Eventually, the floor was clear enough to run a vacuum. We found two, but both were broken. I was able to repair one, and it ate a few bagsful of floor debris before it was OK to walk without kicking up dust. The kitchen floor needed mopping, and it took several buckets of water for that. We washed some sheets we found and after cleaning the roaches out of the sofa, we placed the clean sheets over it as a barrier and curled up together and tried our best to sleep until it was light out and safe. The next day was spent cleaning a room upstairs that we could safeguard from the other inhabitants and we could call home for the next week.

#2. Visiting the aforementioned bride’s sister in the same town, the whole house was pretty dirty. There were hundreds of small dead bugs on the pull-out cutting board in the kitchen. There were dead bugs as well as live ones along the room edges throughout the house from what I could see. I didn’t want to venture beyond the living room and kitchen since I was plenty repulsed by them. At one point in the early evening, I was asked to help with a little problem in the back yard. Apparently, the dog stopped barking the day before. As I rounded the corner, I could see the dead dog nestled against the wall of the house that still got a touch of shade in the hottest part of day. This was in a humid southern state, and it was HOT that summer. The dog had no water. I opened the garbage bag in which I planned to place the deceased, but when I picked up the dog by the leg, the fermented body fluids spilled out from the carcass. The maggots didn’t seem to mind, and I could hear them munching away on the putrid animal flesh. After bagging the body, I left it to the owner to disposes of later.

@ru2bz46 – Are these people still your friends?

@Darwin I haven’t been to their houses since, nor have I seen them much, but I still consider them friends, just dirty ones. ;-)

@ru2bz46: I’m laughing and itching at the same time! Also trying to forget what the smell of dirty baby head smells like

Ewwww! Not the dirty baby head! Aaaaacckk!

@ru2bz46 Good Lord, did you report them to the local SPCA?! Those people should be placed on a watch list for dog ownership or something!

It was many years ago, and my mind wasn’t there. I think of that when I remember the incident. I did strongly advise them not to get anymore pets. At the time, it was all I could do to just get the hell out of there.

Oh! How disgusting!

I dropped a few gallons of soap at a restaurant I worked at. Srsly, not funny. Cleaning soap is impossible.

@ru2bz46 ; You win!
Although, you did just remind me of two “apartment manager stories.”
1. I had just started after a horrific manager had decided that the apartment complex was a perfect place for newly released residents of the local jail to qualify to live. We were in the process of evicting just about everyone in the 128 unit apartment community. One person hadn’t paid her power bill for some time. As her friends got evicted, they were packing all their stuff in this tiny studio apartment and it was full to the brim.
Here in California, you can’t just put someone on the corner for not paying. You have to go through a legal process that takes at least 30 and sometimes 90 days.
One day there was a big commotion outside. The police were there (once again) and this time they were arresting her. My husband managed to yell out as they were hauling her away, “What about your stuff?” She said, “Throw it all away.” The policeman said, “I am a witness I heard that.” Lucky us, she released posession and we got the apartment back early.
In addition to the usual disgusting pornography, mingled with baby pictures, I had to clean out the refrigerator. Apparently, she had just loaded up on meat before her power went out. I took plastic bags and put them over the meat and turned it wrong side out, all the while gagging and even barfing a bit. OH YUCK!!!

2:
A resident was a quality control manager for a local ice cream company. He came out of his apartment clean and bright every day.
We were doing our annual maintenance inspections when he constantly had an excuse to postpone. I had a very good resident manager at that property. She kept hounding him until he finally gave notice to move. He left a note saying, “I didn’t clean the beer cans. I don’t know why.”
When we went in, The beer cans were lining all the walls at least 3 feet, and in some places 5 feet high. There were maggots in the oven and the bathtub was black.
The worst part was that the toilet was full of shit, (no toilet paper) and there were butt prints in it. The little chain that hooks to the flusher had fallen off so he just never flushed the toilet, and obviously didn’t want to call for maintenance.

@Judi – For future reference, if you are faced with a fridge full of rotted something, the best thing to do is put it on the lowest setting until the something is as close to frozen as possible, and then chunk it all into plastic bags.

We had a freezer die while we were on our honeymoon and that is what we had to do with the fish it contained.

Although I suppose if we had waited long enough and added some salt we could have been bottling and selling our own fish sauce..

It was am old refrigerator, they type you had to defrost, but that probably would have been a beter idea. The funny thing is that we stuck a bag of charcoal in it and a month later it spelt as fresh as new. This was all nearly 20 years ago, so I don’t have to do that dirty work anymore, but I can say that I HAVE done it!

@Judi Um…thanks, but I don’t think the prize is worth it. How do people live like that?

They get used to it. It’s amazing what some people can adjust to, especially those with no sense of smell like a roommate I used to have. His dirty laundry was toxic.

[shudder]