Working as a cleaner can sometimes be quite unforgiving. You never know what kind of mess is lurking behind the door you are about to open. Unfortunately, for these Reddit users, they've experienced some of the worst cleaning jobs you've ever heard of.
(Comments have been edited for clarity)
Get The Bleach!
“I’m a housekeeper at a hospital for the midnight shift.
A few days before Christmas, I got a call to come to the ER immediately. A 24-year-old woman positive for Hepatitis A had pooped everywhere and was being discharged. Her feces did not look normal at all. I’m talking bright yellow and orange looking stuff that assaulted my nose as soon as I walked in.
Whatever, I smear some minty toothpaste on my mask, double glove, and gown up to bleach the entire room. Before I can start, the same patient is wheeled back in, and is very still and looking very pale. The doctor and nurses look at her and see that she is not breathing and call a code blue.
The hospital I work at is small and I’m friendly with a lot of the staff so it doesn’t take but a few minutes to be told quietly by the radiologist that she had inhaled some illegal substance that she had hid as she was being wheeled out of the hospital. The poor woman was wheeled to Trauma not too far away from her original room, and since the ER has only a few rooms, I could hear the whole nursing staff trying to revive her as I bleached and stripped the infected exam room. I just wanted to incinerate the linen and curtains when I was done.
I knew all hope for the patient was lost when I saw her parents wailing and a priest holding a bottle of holy water walked through the door at three in the morning.
The mortician was called to collect the body and I spent the rest of my shift dousing the Trauma room with three bottles of bleach. After that I went home, scrubbed myself in the shower, and threw my clothes in the washer three times.”
“Someone Was Definitely Stabbed”
pathdoc/Shutterstock
“One night I get a call that there was a fight on the 4th floor. I call the cops and ask for assistance for a fight happening in our hotel. The elevator is slow and stairs are right next to it so I sprint up all the stairs and at the top landing is a puddle of blood. Someone was definitely stabbed. I cautiously open the door expecting to find a murder in progress. A woman is sitting on the floor in front of the door, her face and hair covered in blood and pee in her pants. An angry man is standing over her. I swore I had just found a man savagely beating the daylights out of his girlfriend. I can tell they were both drinking heavily, and I calmly command the guy, ‘You need to go to your room.’
I expected resistance, and I was ready for a fight with the guy if he went after her again. Instead, he shrugs, and says ‘okay’ and goes to his room. He pauses as he’s opening the door.
‘You’ll take care of her, right?’
I cautiously nod. ‘Yeah, I’ll make sure she’s okay.’ A wise bar-owner once told me to separate wasted people ASAP or they just keep going.
This lady gets to her feet and is smearing her bloody handprints on the walls. I take her by her bloody hand and lead her to the elevator. I tell her the cops are on their way and that she needs to report her boyfriend for beating her. She freaks out. I didn’t understand, just thought she was wasted and stupid. Cops show up, talk to her, talk to the guy, and then the facts come out and I am SO GLAD I stayed calm and didn’t go after the boyfriend.
This dumb girl got trashed at a nearby bar, tripped and busted her lip on a curb, and kept wiping her hands across her face to smooth her hair back while cussing him out and slapping at him. The ‘fight’ was her screaming at him and then spitting blood in his face, so he pushed her back to create distance and she fell on her rump. Then I walked in. Yay.”
“Could I Have Some Privacy Here?”
“I worked at the reception at a hotel for 4 and a half years and I saw just about everything there. Nothing shocks me anymore.
One of the craziest things I witnessed though was a guy who had stayed a few nights before in room 207. He came into reception high as a kite and asking for a room. I told him we were full and he walked off. A few minutes later he comes back saying he’ll pay for room 207 again. I turned him away and reminded him that we had no rooms available.
The reception phone rings not long afterward and a housekeeper (who was heavily pregnant at the time) is in a panic as a guy walked into the room she was cleaning and climbed into the bath. I asked her what room she was in, sure enough, it was room 207. I ran upstairs and into room 207, the man had the bathroom door barricaded from the inside and the bath taps running.
I told him he had to leave or I’d call the police, but he sounded like he was about to pass out. I called the police and when they turned up we were all trying to open the bathroom door. There was no response from this guy now so we were panicking at this point. We finally manage to get the door open and there’s the man asleep fully clothed in an overflowing bath full of water. He wakes up suddenly, looks at the police and says, ‘Could I have some privacy here? I’m having a bath!’ He was taken away in handcuffs and a towel.”
“We Had To Trash Everything In The Room”
“I worked in a pretty crappy Knight’s Inn hotel, but we always kept it incredibly clean. This was also my first housekeeping gig.
A month or two into the job, thinking I had seen it all, we had a couple that was refusing to leave, even though the room was already reserved out. It escalated and I was sent to go open up the room in an attempt to get them to leave without calling the police.
I banged on the door for a good 5 minutes yelling housekeeping and proceeded to open the door.
They had ripped the bed frame that was bolted to the wall off and moved it by the window and were naked in the bed. I noticed how trashed the room was immediately, but I yelled sorry and ran out.
I worked with some pretty hardcore women, so once I told the head cleaner, I’m pretty sure she threatened to beat the guy up and demanded the money for damages that she hadn’t even seen yet. They finally left.
This is when the worst part began. We walked into the room and there were needles, dog collars, cottage cheese, and chicken wing bones everywhere. We had to trash everything in the room, including appliances.
I have never been so horrified before. When I say cottage cheese, it was a huge tub that was smeared over everything and clumped on the floor. There was also chicken bones in the bed I had just caught them in, and hot sauce smeared all over the walls.
The more we cleaned we eventually found more paraphernalia wrapped up in the sheets, along with children’s books/toys.
I’m so thankful that I didn’t get poked by a needle.”
“Excuse Me Ma’am”
FabrikaSimf/Shutterstock
“My boyfriend works for a residential window cleaning company. He once was at this man’s house, probably in his late 50’s, cleaning the windows.
He goes into a room upstairs where the door is already open and sees a naked young women laying in the bed asleep. He rushes out of the room and profusely apologizes, but she never woke up so he goes into other second floor rooms to clean the windows and avoids that room as much as possible. Everything else seems normal, so he brushes it off.
Shortly after, the man walks in there, picks up the women and shoves her in a hallway closet. When my boyfriend is able to get a better look, it was actually a realistic ‘intimate’ doll.”
At Least He Got A Good Tip
“Not a cleaner, but I once delivered a pizza to a hotel room and an obese women covered in bodily fluids answered the door naked. In the background, 4 dudes stood naked pretending like this was totally normal. I figured shocking me and demeaning her further got them off. It was a credit card order and a little of their ‘fluid’ got on it. I left the recept and reprinted it. At least they were good tippers.”
Biohazard
“I used to clean houses. One house I had to clean every other week. Some of the rooms were locked and sealed, and I did not have to clean them.
The people that lived there seemed decent, they were in their 60’s. The house and the couple had a weird smell, not very fresh, but I thought it was just old people smell.
At one point the wife is in hospital, the husband did not leave her side, so their son lets me in to clean the house. While I am doing my thing, he comes to ask if I know where the keys to the locked doors are. I told him that I did not. He tells me to go look outside on one of the windows on the side of the house.
This window is completely covered with flies on the inside. Since he cannot find the keys, he eventually breaks the door to that room open. We were not prepared.
This room was filled with filthy adult diapers and used wet wipes. I am pretty tall, and this pile was almost as tall as me. I lost my lunch right then and there, and the son went pale as snow. Worst, there was another room just like that. I was asked afterward if I would be willing to clear it out and clean the rooms. I told them it’s basically a biohazard and they need specialized service to clear it out.
That was a fun day.”
A Weird Yellow Glow
“I was working at a low budget motel in a ski town. My shifts consisted of mundane tasks like changing light bulbs, fixing clogs, etc. I got a call from one of the maids to come to a room because ‘the lighting is weird.’ I asked her to expand on that and she said that the room just looked strange. Uh ok…
I arrived at the room and sure enough with the lights on and the curtains closed the room was bathed in a weird yellow glow. I look up at the ceiling light expecting that the bulb is underpowered, or the fixture is shorting out and instead find that the glass globe surrounding the bulb is filled right to the brim with pee.
Someone actually unscrewed the light, peed in the globe and (I imagine) carefully put it back. The worst part was that the bulb had actually been submerged in pee and had warmed it back up.”
“Sign Me Up!”
“I was a cleaner once for ‘office buildings’ according to the Craigslist ad. And for 10 dollars an hour?! Sign me up!
I arrived for my job interview. It was a JCPenny in a really bad area. I didn’t think much of it. How bad could it be? I was new to the area and had no idea what I was in store for. Plus, the offices weren’t that bad! It was kinda nice up there actually.
Only, this wasn’t anywhere near where I’d be working. No, I was to work the actual store with no offices involved. Alright, fine. I thought. Again, how bad could this be? It’s ten dollars an hour right?
Nope. It was 8 after I got my first paycheck.
And I could have dealt with that if it wasn’t for how absolutely disgusting people could be.
There are so many creative things women do in the bathroom with their poop. Fling it, write with it, hide it for you to find, stomp on it… You get the picture.
I never encountered this in the men’s bathroom. Those were actually pretty easy to clean, just a quick mop-up of pee splashes, sink and toilet cleaning. Easy peasy. Took me 20 minutes tops.
The unisex bathrooms on the other hand… Those were even worse than the women’s bathroom. Apparently, those were popular hook-up spots. And apparently, there were no protection involved considering the messes left behind. I never thought I’d say this, but if you leave your fluids all over a public restroom you deserve to have your face shoved in it.
And let’s not forget being pelted with trash each day because you people can’t respect other human beings.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who have to deal with a job like this. Seriously, you go through a ton.”
“Hey, Good Luck!”
“So I work as a dorm-keeper at my college. Normally, I only clean a few of the female floors because, well, I’m a female. So one day the people who were supposed to clean the boy’s floors just didn’t show. Our boss asked if anyone wanted to make some extra money and since I’m a broke college kid my hand went up. We got sent off to the floors to clean and I’m a few rooms in and everything had been going perfectly fine.
I get to this room and this kid pokes his head out from across the hall and goes, ‘Hey, good luck!’ and goes back into his room. At this point, I’m just thinking yeah whatever, let’s do this. I open the door and I feel so bad for whoever is going to marry this boy because, first of all, the room smelled like crap. Like actual feces. I gagged and stepped out for a second before covering my mouth and going back in.
The room was covered in clothes, old food, books, papers, basically, you name it, it was there. So I start cleaning and I get halfway through and notice this absolutely rancid smell coming from a drawer and open it. This kid had a dead rabbit just sitting in his drawer. I pulled the poor thing out and stuck it in the trash bag and moved to the next drawer and found a bunch of old syringes and bags of substances that were clearly not legal. At this point I’m dreading opening the third drawer but, for some reason, I do it anyways and this one is full of intimate toys, specifically bondage material and a book for people with a foot fetish. Also, this man had a bag of literal poop in his drawer.
That’s when I dropped everything and ran. Like straight up sprinted out of that room. I went to manager told him everything and that kid got kicked out of our school the next day. I also learned that the kid that had wished me luck was the previous roommate of the kid and had moved rooms to get away from the room.
I quit cleaning rooms after that.”
Definitely An Interesting Day
“I own and work at a small motel and rent a couple trailer houses that are on the property. They are pretty much located in the middle of nowhere. I have quite a few stories of just plain oddness.
The one that would probably be the most interesting was we had a couple come stay for like two-three weeks. I would never ever seen them out of the room, and if I did it was always the woman.
One day I went out to the shop/storage shed to get the lawn mower out and was going to mow the grass. I came down the back of the motel and stop as I see a US Marshal standing at the back of the motel with a fully geared vest and an M4 ready. He just waves me away.
I stop the mower and walk around to the front of the motel and see two unmarked large SUVs sitting in the driveway down by the house, both with undercover cops in it. I go inside and wait around for a few minutes. After a bit, they catch the woman coming out of the motel and storm into the room.
Turns out they were actually some big-time criminals and the police had been looking for them for some time.
Was definitely an interesting day.”
Double Whammy
“I’ve got two: When I first got into the hospitality industry, I worked at a very low-end hotel that was on the verge of collapsing (the property management company was planning on a teardown but wanted to squeeze every ounce out of it first) that saw a lot of corporate/contract guests.
One week we had a group of contractors in town who took up our whole first floor and one evening, a solitary man came back to the hotel early feeling exhausted and ill. In the morning when the crew came to breakfast, the single man from the night before was not around and his crew assumed he overslept. At the front desk we attempted several wake-up calls and ultimately were asked to make sure he was okay by knocking on the door/entering his room.
Well… after several knocks I had to resort to opening his door… And inside I found a (very) dead contractor lying in his bed, the most awful shade of pale I’d ever seen.
A few years later I was an Assistant GM of a luxury property in Virginia and we had a group of people who had assembled a narcotics lab in one of our suites. We didn’t find that one out until the SWAT team showed up to bust them.
Good times. Love hospitality.”
Absolute Chaos
“I worked in a hotel around 14 years ago. I was walking towards work one morning when I saw about 5 police cars outside. I was taking over as shift manager so I went straight over to see the manager that should have been leaving.
Basically, a guy I had checked in the day before, who seemed completely normal, had gone absolutely crazy in his room with an ax! He smashed up the TV, walls, the bathroom door, absolute chaos.
He thought there was a tactical police force abseiling down the hotel walls outside his window to take him away!! I left the job and never found out if he was on sometihg or just having a psychotic episode.”
All Because Of A Craigslist Ad
“A year or so ago my friend and I decided to post an ad on Craigslist for house-cleaning because we were desperate to make some money. We agreed to clean a woman’s house who said she needed to move out quick. She told us her brother would meet us there and to get rid of everything and leave the place ready to be rented out.
Her brother and one of his friends were at the house when we arrived. Her brother and his friend were two huge, intimidating guys. The house was in a bad part of town, but we were pretty desperate to make some cash so we carried our little dusters and bucket full of cleaning supplies up the stairs and they let us in.
What we found inside was baffling. The kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, closets, and hallways were jam-packed with stuff. There was trash, clothes, bags, whatever everywhere. The guys told us to do whatever their sister had instructed us to do and left us there, completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff she expected us to clear out.
The closets were still full of clothes, men’s suits, jewelry, shoes, and handbags. We found stacks of purses with dirty diapers stuffed in them on the floor.
The kitchen drawers and cabinets were full of old food, alongside unopened packages of perfume and cologne, expensive headphones, stacks of CDs, bootleg DVDs, wrist watches, packaged school supplies, stacks of mail, credit cards, IDs, handfuls of quarters and coins, family pictures, etc. There was an entire chicken rotting away on the counter beside piles of dirty, molding dishes.
There were seats from a car in the living room, mattresses, children’s toys, suitcases, old laptops, mp3 players… Just crap everywhere mixed in with garbage and filth. We called the woman and asked her if she was sure we should just throw everything away, and she told us she hadn’t been there in a while but it needed to be emptied out, so yes, she wanted everything trashed.
We filled two huge garbage cans and started a massive pile on the porch. Eventually, the guys returned and started sifting through our trash piles and grabbing nice things. We had no idea what was going on.
We ended up cleaning the place really well. We had to argue with the woman when we finished because she didn’t want to pay us what we had initially agreed. She showed up with a small child and said she had been in the hospital for a while and her brother had been staying there. I still wonder about that place. My friend and I speculated the entire time we cleaned, I felt like we were cleaning up after some crime.”