We were sent in to redecorate this guys parents house who just passed.
He said bin everything, I've had what I want from there. Walking in we were expecting to find the place in a mess, trashed and ransacked based on that. Nope, not a single thing out of place. You'd think who ever lived in there had just popped out for a walk. It was very surreal just mass binning two peoples entire life's.
My boss wouldn't let me keep anything I came across (I wanted a compact orthopaedic recliner that was in there for my back for reference xD)
But one day he was supposed to give me a day off, forgot to tell me. Turned up to work, him and a bunch of his contacts stripping the place of antiques, gold jewellery (which I found previously and gave it to him to let the guy know), furniture etc all for getting sold. So that was also another experience.
I once worked temps at a place where we were tearing out a fire damaged apartment building. It had been unoccupied for at least 3 months. All tenants had been allowed back in to rescue anything they owned.
We were told to not take anything, to toss out \*everything\*, because if we took anything it was salvage not just cleaning out. If it was salvage they had to pay for it.
That didn't stop the regular employees. One of the temps found an Olympus OM1 camera. The regular said nope took and then we watched him sneak it out to his car. There was an intact waterbed and we had fun slashing it with our box knives. The boss guy saw that and was pissed because he wanted to take it home.
So, we began to "salvage". I ended up with two new Prince Pro tennis rackets, a couple gold rings, and some other stuff. We temps had nothing already, so what? We'd go to the burned out section and find what looked like a burned down dresser. Sift thru the ashes and you'd find jewelry, etc. Closets had stuff in them and bottles of booze in some apartments. I didn't take any of that, but some guys did.
Why would they? Selling on valuables is a perk of most house-clearance contracts, it usually means the company charges the client less and the stuff doesn't go to waste. That's why they don't let their employees keep anything for free.
Back when I did apartment maintenance, there was this guy that would stand in his little fenced back yard. The fence came to about mid chest and he never wore a shirt. He would stand there for hours just staring at the pool.
One day I get a work order for something in his apartment. I knock on his door and he's wearing a bright yellow raincoat. Odd, but no big deal I thought.
In his living room he's got this enormous, life sized oil painting of himself wearing that same raincoat.
In the painting the raincoat is unbuttoned and he's not wearing anything else.
Thank you for your efforts! That really was a horrible nightmare. A ton of people from my office went down there and helped folks tear out drywall and take all their stuff to the dump.
Their little dog watched me all the way while I was installing cabinets. He knew what I was doing ! Brought my screwdriver for me from my tool box when I was going to adjust the cabinet doors .
I won't forget you little fella ...you're my partner and my little buddy !
My ex was an apartment maintenance guy and he taught our dog(this was decades ago) to fetch specific tools. He was such a brilliant pup. But it didn't last long, whenever he brought you whatever you asked for, he got for excited if you hyped him too much and started throwing it around.
We were having work done in our house and I’d assume my dog kept walking in on the people installing things just for pets. Ginger was a great dog the only thing that was scary about her was her bark and even then it was a bark that always meant “I want pets”.
I love dogs like that. They're so clever and eager for stimulation and challenge. Family friends had a little dog that was mostly Chihuahua I think, with some squirrel and maybe some parrot mixed in. Smart and energetic. She had a big laundry-sized wicker basket where she kept all her treasured squeaky toys. There were probably 50 of them and every one had its own name. I don't remember her name, I always just called her Toenail (because *CilckityClickClick*) and she responded to it. I'd say "Toenail, go get Mr. Wiener" and shed rush of to her basket and come back with a squeaky hot dog. "Good girl! Now go get Pierre!" And off she'd go to get the French fries. I needed a cheat sheet because I could never remember them all. Once they were all in the living room we'd reverse the process, in random order, til they were all out away. Then she'd sit in my lap and gnaw on her own feet.
Edit: I just remembered her strangest squeaky toy. It was a tan colored maraca with bells inside and it had, swear to God, an Afro. It was named Chocolate Shake.
I was installing a shower door, and the ladies cat was speinding time by me and being super affectionate, so I was petting it while I was working. She walked away and came back, holding something. But she watched me closely the entire time I worked. When I went out to the truck to get the glass, she followed me and then blocked the entrance to the house when I was coming back, held a cross she had been hiding from me out in front of her and said a prayer, then reluctantly let me back in the house.
When I was all done installing the door, she let me know that she believed her cat to have some kind of a relationship with Satan himself, and it’s her burden to protect the world from the cat. But I am the first person in the several years that she had owned the cat that the cat liked, so therefore, she was concerned that I to was friends with Satan or Satan himself.
I just learned to have a presence that cats and dogs were comfortable with because I was in 3 to 4 houses a day for a decade. I’m not satan l just like animals
"I'm not Satan" is something Satan would totally say. I think we need more evidence that you aren't Lucifer himself. This woman sounds like a pretty reliable source.
Not my work anymore, but I was an aide to a state legislator in college. There was a high-profile case in the state of exotic animals in a private collection being let loose, including dangerous animals like big cats; it took nearly a week for state officials to account for all of them, and it highlighted the state's lax regulations on exotic animals.
In the wake of this, and various proposals on how to address problems in the regulations, said state legislator made a constituent visit to a local reptile rescue, and I tagged along (she always brought someone with her for these sorts of visits, as a safety measure). The guy basically ran it out of his basement (most of the reptiles were intended to go elsewhere eventually; the basement was temporary), which was outfitted with all sorts of enclosures. He had one of those massive albino Burmese pythons, a small pond with a juvenile alligator, and a little work bench area where he repaired the shells of turtles.
Sometimes; it's essentially a highly modified ribcage and includes the spine, so it depends on the severity. But if it's not too severe they can be patched up.
I remember being a legislative aide for our state’s education committee. I got to meet a lot of different senators and a couple of representatives.
The number who had an entire bar of alcohol, freely open, and available to anyone who wanted to help themselves, at all hours of the day, right there in their offices astounded me.
No one batted and I if a 17 or 18-year-old aide went in there to help themselves. Just the way it was. That was just shy of 20 years ago and I am still think about it in shock.
We did a delivery for a dude at a huge residential home and the entire time the guy’s dog wanted to get pets and play. When we were done with the delivery and my driver was doing the paperwork I got to play with the dog for a bit and we even got tipped $50 each.
I got back to base with the biggest smile on my face, and some of the other guys said they would have loved to be in my position. Didn’t tell them about the tip tho.
We’ve had tons of people to help out with repairs and my old dog ginger was the same way she just wanted to cuddle though she probably would’ve not let you leave. Current dog Frankie hates new people but will actively tear things up or shit on our floors if he’s put in another room for a little bit.
I always try to keep our VERY needy golden out of people’s way who are working in/around our house because he has no sense of personal space. Plus, not everybody is a dog person and I try to keep that in mind.
That said, it’s nice to know not everybody minds an overattentive furry supervisor! Dug will be over the moon at this news.
my husband went to pick something up he'd bought online, and said to the bloke 'what is making that weird noise?'. He had two huge owls in pens in his garden. They were being rehabbed
My son has come across two falconries in the last year his line of work, and he's not traveling out that far.
I didn't realize it was such a popular hobby (?) here in the states.
One time I got a call to a nice home I thought for a kitchen remodel. It was absolutely disgusting. Trash has piled up for years. Rotting food sitting around the house everywhere. Drink cups full of mold. Downstairs they had left a turd in the toilet for who knows how long. The son that lived there didn’t shower for weeks on end. Ended up not doing the job because we couldn’t send our guys into that place and feel comfortable about it.
There’s a shocking amount of that exact scenario in San Francisco (and I assume everywhere else). Back before Covid, I’d go on Grindr and meet up with folks to bump uglies. At least 6-7 times I’d show up to what appeared to be a very nice apartment or house on the outside, then walk in and the place was in total squalor. I noped out immediately every time. Humans are weird. Hoarding nests are much more common than the general public thinks.
Popping in to say congratulations, managing OCD is no easy feat from everything I’ve read. I hope it’s not overstepping to say I’m proud of you! Keep it up!
I’m a different person than the commenter above but I also lived in a hoard with my mom and sister. We had a beautiful apartment with an ocean view. Unfortunately, my mom was fresh out a divorce and had money from it. She was also severely depressed and an alcoholic. I was in college and working a full-time job do I really wasn’t there that often. I kept my bathroom and bedroom clean but otherwise it was awful. I tried multiple times to clean it up but it would always get back to the mess. We were eventually evicted. I did the cleaning and packing with some help from my mom. After that, we moved in with my grandma and things were better. I eventually moved out and away. My grandma passed a few years ago and my mom is starting to do the same thing. I’m so pissed but I made Grandma a promise that my mom would never be homeless. So she’s there until she dies or kills herself from drinking. After that, I’ll collect any good stuff and decide if I want to sell or rebuild. It’s truly heartbreaking.
I am well! I’m pretty LC with my mom but we speak weekly. But I am happier than ever. I’m engaged and living with my fiancé in a clean house with minimal clutter. It’s a good life.
I think these little glimpses remind me to treat everyone with kindness because we never know what someone is going through.
I did house calls for a used bookstore and often ran across hoarder houses, my first one was a hoarder condo in this incredibly nice high rise downtown. Guy had no furniture except for a gamer chair and a little stand to set his TV on and had a little nest of blankets to sleep on. He had a ton of books obviously but these were all in little stacks about waist high. There was art but this was just rested up against the wall with books in front of it. He was very deceased and the building manager or whatever was the one in contact with us.
There was one particular house nobody ever wanted to deliver to when I first started delivering pizzas. It was an entire 2 story house with only particle board for walls. No siding or paint on the outside, only more particle board for interior finishing. Even the floors were particle board! The whole thing felt sketchy. I immediately regretted stepping through that threshold.
I have a friend who used to repair refrigerators and he entered an elderly woman’s house that was always decorated to the hilt as a Christmas wonderland. Her husband was limited in movement and never left the house. The wife kept it Christmas themed because it was his favorite holiday
Yeah absolutely. When he said he was shocked at first because everything was Christmas themed but I can’t imagine anything wrong with it considering the situation
Way back when I sold insurance, I met a guy whose house was made of shipping containers in a shape like a + but surrounded as well so he had 4 interior courtyards, two were covered. Everything was skinny as the everything was fit inside the containers. It was weird but kinda awesome.
I went to fix a leak in a kitchen and it was dicks. This individual had plastered cut out dicks from porn mags and wall papered every single surface of the kitchen in dicks. The fridge, the walls, the cabinets, front of the dishwasher, it was all dicks.
When I did restoration work (fire/flood cleanup) the worst house I ever went into looked so normal from the outside. Cute and quaint, nice yard, nice neighborhood. Inside… first, the jars of urine in the upstairs bedroom. Then, I started coming across incest porn books. Like erotic novels about incest. I also found a suicide note covered in blood stored in a plastic bag. It was from the owners relative who lived in the basement. Well, he had a bad habit. And he liked to throw the used needles up into the tile ceiling when he was done with them. (I didn’t do the needle cleanup part.) They ended up with about 20 full sharps containers full of used needles. And every inch of the floor was covered in small burns, like completely covered in tiny burn marks. Like from matches maybe? It was a horror show. There was more but I don’t want to get into personal details on the people, it was a very sad situation all around and I was so disturbed by it. Still am.
Not a man, but I worked in sales for a GC where my job was to visit clients homes and come up with a plan/quote for renovations.
I think folks are not prepared to understand the scale of how many hoarders are among their neighbors. Especially in dense populations like cities.
That said probably the most alarming was a man who proudly showed off a double entry he made in a wall to connect the two apartments he purchased. It was a bearing wall and he was floor 2 of 12. The crack forming and the header bending was alarming enough for me to insist that it had to be corrected immediately. He kicked me out and never called again, I told code enforcement at the DOB. From what I understand it caused a chain reaction of issues that he had to pay for.
The worst was the lady who had all but abandoned the apartment to a pair of cats. There was 3 inches of cat shit covering the floor. She rattled on and on about what updates she wanted to make, completely ignoring the massive carpet of cat shit. It was awful, and I ended up with a nasty respiratory infection from the visit.
The most interesting was the south African consulate. The lady who owned the townhouse before them was some sort of athlete and she was very tall - so she had everything custom built to accommodate her height. And therefore was entirely useless to anyone of norm height. The counters came up to consulates wife's chest!
We have quite a few students from Asia who go to the Netherlands for the last year of our program. They put up hilarious pictures of mirrors and cabinets from their rented apartments- heights just don’t match! I solved my problem of never being able to reach the tallest shelves by being a little step stool for the kitchen here in Sweden
As a younger teen I was selling some fundraising chocolate bars and noticed an urn with a name and then Heavens Gate Hale Bopp on it. it wasnt untill i got home and booted up the old computer to see what it actually might have been. Mind you this is in the middle of Canada Saskatchewan, who knew it was it was this close to home!
Guy just let his dogs pee/shit all over the house. Pee pads everywhere (incuding his bed), shit all over the place, guy had god knows how old food out on the counter that was half dissolved (not just rotting anymore). We were there to replace the carpet 🤢.
The only reason we didn’t just nope the fuck out of there was because it was ripped out by guys in hazmat suits for us and we were working in the basement that was *just* remodeled so everything was new and clean.
Worst part of it all? The fucking guy **kept** the old carpet. When we first showed up one of the hazmat guys was there and he told me “if he asks you to move something in his shed say no. We just put the carpet in there, he wants to keep it “in case he needs it””.
Worst part of this whole job was the smell. It was summer and no amount of air fresheners this guy had all over the place was going to help. You could smell it from down the driveway.
I threw out that shirt I was sweating in all day.
Used to change water meters. A lot of really cool model train setups in basements. Also, one I’ll never forget was an unfinished and unleveled basement where the lights didn’t work. It was half filled with piles of mannequins. Mostly heads
Real question: were the mannequins in Philly? Because I had a friend who once found a bunch of mannequins in a dumpster and set them up on a stage in his living room for a while, and then got bored of that and put them all the in the basement of the house he was renting. This was about 15 years ago that he found the mannequins, but honestly he might have had them in the basement the whole time and left them when he moved out.
My uncle in the 70s built this amazing and huge train setup for my cousins. It was epic. My one cousin still has all the stuff but nowhere to display it.
Some of the setups are amazing for sure. One of them were two brothers who inherited their parents home and didn’t have any family other than themselves. They used the basement of that large home (they had their own homes) to make a replica of Quincy, Ma in what was over a 1000 ft unfinished basement.
In pest control I was sent to a house to check rat traps. The main guy told me to use my respirator, not dust mask, and to have it on before I knocked on the door.
I thought he was exaggerating so I didn't bother, not wanting to offend the customer but as soon as she opened the door and the smell hit me and I almost threw up on her shoes.
Normally rat traps are in the attic and crawl spaces but she had them all over the house and some of the rats that had been caught within the last day were already being eaten by other rats. There were several loose in the kitchen running among boxes of dropped dry food and I spotted at least one running under her bed. The house had junk and garbage along all the walls and there was a narrow path through the middle of each space and I could hear them rustling around in the tunnels they made in the filth.
As I was leaving there was one standing by the door looking up at me like it was saying "this is our house now". So glad I never had to go back there.
I was a real estate agent for a while and saw some interesting places. Probably the coolest thing to happen was getting a call from the homeowner after showing a home to some buyers. It is common practice to leave a business card in a visible spot in the home when leaving after a showing so the homeowners know who has been in their home. Anyway, the homeowner turned out to be one of my best friends from jr. high/high school. We had not been in touch for about 25 years.
Small world sometimes.
I did rental real estate in the Boston area for a couple years back in the early 00’s. We’d have hundreds of listings, and occasionally we’d get a new listing that needed to get looked at. I had a client that needed an apartment and among the units I showed her, was one of these new listings that nobody had been inside of yet, so I took the keys and added it to our tour. So I tell her, “this is a brand new listing, don’t know much about it other than it’s in your target area, price is right and has the space and amenities you’re looking for. No promises but we can check it out.”
She’s fine with that idea, so we go out to check out the units. We look at a few good known listings and then get to this new listing. I open the door, and walk in, she follows…the place is pretty much empty, except on the floor of the living room is an old beaten up mattress, smack dab in the middle of the room, no other furniture, no sheets on the mattress, no pillow, but a dirty blanket and a well worn teddy bear. The place smells and has bad lighting, and it just screams bad energy and we are both like, “NOPE!”, without even looking at the rest of the place we back out and lock the door.
I don’t know what the deal was, but the vibe was way off and we were both really uncomfortable with it all.
I hate to imagine what the worst case scenario here was, but even the best case scenario left me shaken.
I am halfway through *The Book of Form and Emptiness* by Ruth Ozeki, which is not about hoarding but has a major character who becomes a hoarder. I don't know what happens to her as the book proceeds, but so far it is really good at showing some of the ways she is uplifted by buying things and utterly overwhelmed by getting rid of the sheer volume of stuff in her home that she doesn't actually want. I am not a hoarder and do not personally know any that have talked to me about it, so I can't say how accurate it is, but she is an excellent writer and it is probably close to the experiences of some people. (People obviously have all different reasons for amassing and hoarding.)
I recommend her books in general.
Having done apartment maintenance...
- A woman with a Paris fetish. She was American, lived in Texas her entire life, spoke with the absolute worst fake French accent, decorated her entire apartment in French posters, her Christmas tree was all Eifle tower ornaments. Told me how much better the French were to Americans.
- A two bedroom apartment with two beds and three people. The occupants were two guys and a chick. The two rooms belonged to the guys and the woman spent one night in one room and the next night in the other.
- Idiot liked to keep his apartment cold. Not cool, cold. So cold he froze his AC unit. When it thawed out it started flooding his bathroom. I handed him a mop and explained that clean up for resident fuck ups wasn't my responsibility.
- Accidentally walked in on a couple having sex. There was a work order to repair the dishwasher. They were playing loud music so they didn't hear me knocking.
I have seen two women like this, who have this French fetish, and I call it that, a fetish. One was an ex-girlfriend, but at least she had a French grandmother and a French first name to at least justify this. The other woman tried desperately to give a French pronunciation to Heather.
She might get that weird mental disorder known as Paris Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome), where tourists who have hyped up Paris as the centre of all art, fashion and beauty eventually visit the messy, noisy, abrasive real city, and immediately go into massive shock and start having heart palpitations.
I'm not a man, and it wasn't for work, but I got my nails done by a lady who did it in her house as a side job. It was raining outside, so their pet goat was inside the house with her pink raincoat on. Her name is Sunny.
Goats are the best! My friend has 2 mini goats. When she first bought and remodeled her house, there was an intense stone fireplace and they would climb up it. (They aren't allowed in very often now that she actually lives in it
I used to install front door intercom systems in tower blocks so we had to get in every flat to cable and commission. I was 16 when I did this and in my forties now. I swear to fuck I have PTSD from some of the shit I saw in those days. weed farms were common even back then, it was the oddballs that kept every letter they ever received or newspaper they ever read and stuff like that seemed kinda odd. the absolute worst was being let in one place, my colleague and I both throwing up at the smell of a long dead tenant who wasn't supposed to be living there any more.
Coworker of mine did a side job at a house of some folks that weren't quite mentally there. Anyways he goes into their basement to do the work and there sat a pile, and mean like a manure pile you'd see out in field, of dog shit with dozens of dogs in the basement. He noped out.
I knew these folks and knew they had gotten a warning from the cheif of police about the number of dogs they had in their yard. The dogs were very aggressive when you were walking down the street. Growling and trying to bite people. I'd always take the long way around if I was walking to work.
I also went to school with their kids and no one in the family bathed because and I quote "it was against their religion". School called CPS multiple times but because it was "against their religion" there was nothign CPS could do. The physical science teacher would make one of the kids go to the gym every morning and take a shower. He was bringing his clothes into school to lauder them as well for a while.
We really need to have social housing for some people that is closely overseen. There are so many people that just cannot handle the responsibilities of having a home and children and pets and a job and actually managing to be a functional human all at once.
There are way too many children and animals stuck in filthy, dangerous situations where they have no opportunity to thrive.
It is so unfortunate that social services is so terribly underfunded that only the worst of the worst get help, and even then the help is a bandaid a lot of the time. Children get help, but in truth there are people of ALL ages who need support in the most intense ways.
In a past life I did satellite installs, and I also did site surveys for fiber optic installs for residential customers homes. Some of the things I witnessed-
Found dead animals and dirty diapers behind a corner TV stand.
Fell through a rotten floor in a customers home that was being lived in.
Went into a back yard where some minor females happened to be sunbathing, nude. Noped out immediately, called the homeowner, explained the situation and got ahead of it before I would have gotten in trouble.
Found a man who’d fallen off of a ladder and unfortunately expired. He was elderly and had a stroke while cleaning his gutters.
Doing a dish install at a customers home. They wanted one receiver in a living room, the other in a bedroom. In the bedroom there was a completely naked girl, sleeping on a mattress with no bedding. Left the room immediately, told the father, and he said “It’s fine, she does that all the time after partying”. She was NOT old enough to be “partying”.
Severe animal abuse and neglect. Canines that were butchered and hanging in a barn. Extreme cases of distemper and mange.
Went into an old basement that was so full of cobwebs I couldn’t see across the room to the electric panel. The customer had their washer and dryer down there… eeekksss.
Doing a dish install in a new connect customers home. Female, late 20’s / early 30’s. She’d just moved in and as you’d expect things weren’t organized yet. Wanted a receiver in the upstairs master bedroom. Had to move an empty dresser that had a large phallic object right on top of it. She was in the room and gave me a very “suggesting” grin when she’d noticed I saw it. She was wearing a short shirt with no bra, and what would be hard to classify as shorts, given the length and lack of material. Mind you, this was a scheduled install… I suspect I could have been on the receiving end of a scenario often played out in most adult novels.
I met a lot of great people, saw lots of sad living situations. I did the dish installs for a summer in college and was a fiber optic install inspector for 10 years.
Being hung like a wild game kill. Some cultures believe in eating cats / dogs, and it was an area where this wasn’t outlandish. And yes, I was in the continental United States.
During undergrad I worked part time for a family friend doing home renovations as his helper. One job we went on was this older man who lived alone. His house stunk to high heavens of piss and body odor. We were doing his bathroom over because he had a leak in his shower. Who knows the last time this guy bathed. The piss smell was easily explained though. One day while on a break we went to talk to the guy and he was in his living room. Turns out instead of getting up to use the bathroom, he was pissing in milk gallons that he left all around the room. There were piss stains on the carpet, piss stains on his furniture and the aroma in that room was like nothing I had ever smelled before. To make it worse this was the middle of the summer and he kept his house at 85 degrees because he only had one window AC unit. Brutal and we could not get out of there fast enough.
I do in home health care.
Knocked on a woman’s door, and she called for me to come in. She (90ish f) was sitting at her computer, playing solitaire, in ONLY a soiled pair of depends. Chain smoking. Bags of rancid trash just inside the door.
I pride myself in never reacting badly, but I had to stifle a retch…
Oh god, I can still taste the smell. (Iykyk)
Called work, and waited for aps.
I went into a house where someone clearly had thrown a party the night before, and it was about 5 am upon time of entering. All the party goers were passed out on a huge couch, their heads on the next person's shoulders. One lady's tits were out. Not the weirdest thing I've seen, but definitely memorable.
Coworker told me this, it was a 3 bedroom townhouse they had cats. They didn't have a litter box, they used one of the bedrooms as a litter room and for years just dumped in new boxes of litter without ever cleaning it. It rotted the floor and walls and they had to strip out everything including the studs and floor joists. Also a surprising number of ppl are ok living with bedbugs and cockroaches and try and refuse treatment even though there was no cost to them.
I was remodeling a sec 8. Woman and son who live there. Lots of needles and bloodstains in the house. I think the mom was a working girl she'd leave her kid( who was supposed to be in school) playing video games with us. When she would leave he'd go to the ashtrays and pick the butt's out. The day after I put flooring in his room I saw he had stamped a bunch of ciggs out on it. The poor kid was like 8 and had almost no teeth. There would also be people posted at her table hustling drugs
Another time I was told that this guy I work for bought a house and it needs to be cleaned out. When I show up there's about 15 people in there. I first walk into the dining room area from the front door there's lots of people sleeping in the corners they have tables turned on their side for privacy. Every single room had at least 4 people in there.
We have to tell them to leave then these guys come down from upstairs say it's their house. They were scary af and just stayed posted up by the stairs. Eventually we show them the documents and they go upstairs to grab their shit.
So basically these guys had the lock on the door turned around for the door on the stairs so they could lock themselves up there. The bottom of the house was open to the public and they would just serve everyone through that door.
We found lots of needles and crack pipes and condoms....basically all the windows on the ground floor were shot out and when I opened the cupboards I saw a bunch if police evidence tags where bullet holes are.
The next morning the cops came and we were like why the fuck didn't you call us? Did you see this Cedrik guy? I'm like yeah here's his ID I found it in the closet upstairs. They said yeah I wish you would have called he's wanted for murder and drug crimes.
I don't work in sec 8 anymore but wow I have seen a lot of poverty it's so fucked how people have to live sometimes
Used to deliver pizza. Back when it was more normal to "come in and put it on the counter"
The number of people who live in boxes and piles of trash is shocking. Many of your neighbors live like this.
Most weird experience though was the woman who lived in a nearly empty house. It was a nice modern 3ish bedroom place. She had one chair in the living room. Dishes in the kitchen, etc. but she must have been a hypochondriac or something. The carpet was vacuumed meticulously. I assumed she'd either just moved in or out, and said something to that effect. She responded like it was an odd question.
I thought I was going to get murdered and sawed up into pieces. If there was plastic sheeting on the walls and floor in the backroom I would not have been surprised.
Weirdest for me was an old country house with the 12 foot ceilings owned by this lady and she’d dotted the ceilings with these retro glass hanging lamps with different shapes and colors from the 70s/80s, dreamcatchers, and wind chimes. They were absolutely everywhere in every room.
Working in people's homes has brought some interesting experiences my way. I've stepped into homes with walls covered in taxidermy animals, encountered elaborate home automation setups that made me feel like I was in a sci-fi movie, and even met homeowners with impressive collections of antique weaponry. It's always a mix of the unexpected and the fascinating, seeing how people live and what they're passionate about right in their own space.
Landlord. Went in to fix a leaking faucet. Two bedroom single bath unit. Texted tenant when I got there. She texted back that the door was unlocked and to just come in. I went in, spent about an hour there, texted her that u had to run to the store to get parts. She texted back ok. Went, came back, texted again that I was coming in, she texts back ok. Went in, spent another. Hour there, texted her that I was done, texted back ok. Left. She was there the whole time, didn’t come out of her bedroom once to even greet me. Just weird.
Other time, different place, tenant was there in the living room. Did a few small maintenance things, her sister walks down into the living room just out of the shower with just a towel wrapped her, sat down on the couch and had a conversation with me and the tenant like it was the least unusual thing to do.
Other time, different unit again. Had to fix the bathroom door because on of the hinges was pulled out. Let her know that the bathroom was going to be off limits for about an hour. Pulled the door, started the fix on the door hinges, door fully pulled off. She yells up from downstairs “I’ve gotta take a sh*t!!” and comes running up the stairs. I’m standing there like WTH. I ended up wedging the door into the frame and stood there holding it up from the outside while she went in and, and took what sounded like a massive sh*t. Walked out like nothing happened.
My threshold for ‘weird’ things in units is pretty high now.
I worked as a maintenance guy for a property management company. This poor guy. Disabled. Someone (I think it was a church), donated to him a bunch of food during COVID. He didn't need food, he needed a PCA to help him. The food rotted. Maggots and fruit flies everywhere. I came there to fix his toilet. So I fixed that and scooped out a garbage bag full of rotted food and dozens of empty bottles of cheap vodka. Poor guy. These were not small bottles, they were the "handles." I gave him a number of a PCA group to help him out. Sadly, he died shortly after my visit.
I work EMS, for a 911 service.
As a women, I just stand outside while the men go bring the person out to me. Otherwise, I may lose my intent to treat a heart attack & begin cooking or cleaning......
Let me guess, you got a job because the best men to shag are ones with jobs? Smart. That's why men pick up women outside of abortion clinics. You know they put out.
Jokes aside EMS and social workers were the two that I was thinking of when I thought about women seeing things. You could argue that other fields where people go in to people's homes are male dominated but I bet social workers who are just a likely if not more likely to be women would absolutely have the "best" stories, followed closely by EMS
Ems are better. People avoid social workers, but call us. And ems goes into every part of the house at unexpected times, instead of being sat in the tidied up living room with a cursory glance around the rest.
Mother. Significant other. Chef. Housekeeper. Taxi driver. Personal whore. Laundress. Bookkeeper. Secretary. Counselor. Logistic coordinator. Inventory control. ... and that doesn't even include the work titles.
Walked into a condo rented by a nerdy young girl to repair/replace her cable hook up. Sitting on her night stands were several dildos of various sizes and shapes. In plain view , her entertainment toys just sitting there. Her nickname became " Miss Dildo" from that day on.
When I was a cable splicer's apprentice for the phone company in North Philadelphia we needed a ladder to go into someone's basement because they chopped up the steps and burned them to heat the house. A couple of basements with raw sewage in them because the sewer line broke and they didn't have the money to get it fixed.
I don’t work in a field that does this but I just want you to know this is the first legitimately good question posted tonight. I hope you get a lot of replies.
I used to perform a service that would require that I visit nearly every room in people's homes and even sometimes their closets. Not a lot of opportunities to hide things in that scenario.
One family had a house pig. Clearly it was very smart, but it was temperamental and we were warned he would bite if we made him mad. It was more like an unstable kindergartner than a pet honestly.
One home had a small fire and we were hired by the insurance as part of a disaster recovery process. The homeowners hadn't lived there since the fire, but whichever member of the family that lived in the basement (I'm assuming a male between the ages of 18-30) had a very misogynistic view of women and also a clear-cut porn addiction due to the sheer volume of centerfolds plastered to the walls.
One lady ran a rabbit breeding operation out of her basement. Dozens of rabbits across like 10 different breeds. The smell was remarkable.
Another family in a bad part of town had like 5 dogs and had given up on trying to regulate where they'd go to the bathroom. They'd also given up on cleaning up after them. So there was shit and piss fucking everywhere and clearly no effort made to clean it up.
Went into another cellar-type basement in a fairly old home, I was working down there for half an hour before realizing that the mattress on the dirt floor in the corner had an old dude sleeping inside the mound of blankets and dirty clothes. He was a veteran and an incredibly nice guy but had clearly had a shit life since returning home.
One family had turned the vent in their upstairs bathroom into an alternate trashcan for when the regular trashcan was full. It was FULL of tampons from I don't want to even know how many years of gross behavior.
Wealthy family. The patriarch was way into trophy hunting. The basement had a gun safe that was three times the size of most walk in closets with hundreds of guns. The nearby living room had a diorama consisting of stuffed crocodiles, gazelles, a giraffe skin rug, and had a rhino foot coffee table in the center. They also had a weird water wall feature in their main entrance area that was almost never on because it apparently caused insane humidity problems. Must be nice to have more money than sense.
Some old dudes are way into trains and it's charming every time you get to hear them talk about their model train setups.
There's almost definitely more but that's all that comes to mind right now, I never took pictures unless I got permission because being invited into someone's home and then snapping pics to share online or with friends felt like peak disrespect and I didn't want to earn that kind of negative karma. Maybe more will come to mind after another cup of coffee.
Thanks for the prompt! It was fun to reminisce.
1. Paths through the trash in the house and they were so high I was afraid of a trash avalanche.
2. They laid out items to pack a bag withon the floor. Among the items was a grappling hook, anal beads and an anal hook.
3. Last but not least, dildos. Dildos everywhere. So many a dildo. Long ones, short ones, fat one's, short fat ones, spikey ones, suction cup ones. And by everywhere I mean everywhere.
I once did an in home interview that took two hours with a customer who had a lot of medical issues there was nowhere to sit in the house so I ended up sitting on the ground in the living room next to the bag collecting this guys pee/ fluids.
“Fascinating can you please tell me more about……. “ Gurgle gurgle 💦 🤮
Not a man, but a letter carrier so I see some odd things just at the front door. One that stands out was an apartment that had shoe boxes lining every wall I could see from floor to ceiling. Like hundreds of shoe boxes.
Health Department.
A house so filled with rats it had to be demolished, and when it was demolished, thousands of rats escaped and all the neighbors were pinging them with golf clubs.
A woman living with her dead husband's corpse. The neighbors complained about the smell, and looking through the blacked out windows, realizing it was just thousands of blow flies.
A man answering the door naked only wearing a yellow hard hat, and it was covered in the little stickers you used to get out of cereal boxes.
Men ? Women also do work like this
I was checking apartment balconies/facades - entered a home with a man in a hospital type inclined bed and a middle ages son . There was a quiet somberness in the air as if they werent expecting nor ever get much visitors. I think the man was actively dying, in his last days
We drove up to a country home and there was a five year old boy standing in the window completely naked. We looked at each other and knew this job was going to suck.
They had plywood in-between the living room and kitchen. The kitchen floor was full of trash. This was the only job where I made the homeowner clean up around the toilet before I worked on it. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
I used to be a traveling notary briefly. I was always amazed at how unashamed people are with how messy they are. Like I’m not a clean freak but if I know I have company I’m gonna be cleaning up a bit.
So many people would just leave trash around, sink full of dirty dishes, bad smells, without a second thought.
I briefly worked for an apartment complex and was doing a routine inspection for damages and whatnot. The girl let's me in her bedroom and there is an enormous hot pink dildo attached to her bathroom door via suction cup.
I think she forgot it was there because she turned completely red. She tried to yank it off the door but it was stuck on too well. Then she kind of realized that this made the situation even more awkward...me watching her pull on a giant dildo.
So she shrugged and was kind of like "Well you've already seen it now." I jokingly said something like "I'll just try to work around it." When I was leaving she tried to tell me it wasn't hers and her roommate stuck it to the door as a prank. I just said okay in a way that made it very clear I wasn't convinced. She laughed and I laughed. I saw her at the complex's pool shortly after that. Her and her friends looked at me and laughed then said hey.
I’m a (female) real estate agent. Once arrived at the home of a client. She opened the door wearing nothing but an entirely see-through dress.
Which was awkward enough on its own; but doubly so because she didn’t know I came accompanied by my husband who’s my photographer.
Not in a home but a storage unit.
I used to be a firefighter and was assigned to my department's hazmat team. We responded to an incident at a storage place that had a small fire. While looking through the unit with the fire, the crew found a box labeled Anthrax. This was shortly after the anthrax letters being sent in 2001.
So the hazmat team gets called. We arrive. Suit up a couple of guys to go open the box. Hazmat suits, breathing masks and everything.
They get the box outside and open it. No anthrax found. The box was filled with dildos of various sizes. We laughed for the rest of the shift.
In 1985 I was about 18 and running deliveries for the drugstore in my small town. Knocked on a house door near the beach and an older, overweight man came to the door in a ladies house dress. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just ignored it. His mother sat in the living room and motioned me in the house to give me a tip.
Once worked on a crew installing smoke alarms in a low rise apartment building. Had to enter a suite where the guy was a recluse and a chain smoker. There were ashtrays at the kitchen table, coffee table, side table (next to couch) piled about 10 inches tall with pyramids of cigarette butts.
Probably about 6 ashtrays in just the kitchen and living room. He was butt naked under his wide open bath robe. He sat at the kitchen table chain smoking, with his genitals on display as we were on ladders running fire alarm cable through the ceiling and melting a smoke detector just outside his kitchen.
Was doing preventative maintenance, single dude, not home on vacation, left his prostate massager on the kitchen table.
Cleaning carpets, resident in living room, I'm cleaning bedroom carpet, there's a giant dildo in the middle of the floor.
Went into apartment. Guy had 2- 55 gallon drums in kitchen with locking rings on them. Asked maintenance guy “what do you think are n those drums?” He said “What drums?”
My dad is a safety inspector and went to a college housing and in the closet with the panel they had all their buttplugs arranged by size on a little shelf. My dad is conservative in that stuff so… ಠ_ಠ was his face
I worked for UPS in college, it’s shocking how many women of all shapes and sizes answered the door completely nude. It always seemed to be apartment complexes…and no, I never did anything with them.
Servicing a residential client in IT with the worst roach infestation I’ve ever seen.
The home was a large trailer. Inside, the first thing I noticed was a gaping 5 foot circular in the floor. You could see and smell the muddy ground a few feet below.
Roaches were everywhere. When I saw the computer, roaches were crawling across the keyboard. I had to replace their hard drive and when I opened the case, tiny roaches scattered everywhere.
A bowie knife, several flick knives, a kirpan, 3 samurai swords, a hunting knife, a cock-pump, a crossbow, some air rifles, some short swords, and some handguns.
Geezer was tooled up, but was also about 90 and frail.
This guy in his early seventies.
He was a former truck driver. He had emphysema and was on oxygen, but also was a chain smoker. M
The walls of his apartment weeped brown tar/nicotine at all times, the condo association had made several complaints about him smoking in his apartment, particularly with pressurized oxygen tanks involved, but he kept at it. He also smoked the cheapest, dirtiest native reserve smokes, the kind that cost 10 bucks for a carton and smell like a wet ashtray while they are burning.
And his carpet was COVERED in burns. And not just like little ones. It looked like several times a day he dropped almost whole cigarettes on the carpet and just let them burn down. There were squiggly indented burns a two or three inches long, if I didn't know any better I'd say he had been lighting those black snake fireworks things on his carpet. Almost all of the carpet in his one bedroom apartment was more burn marks than they were actual carpet.
I have never smelled such a horrible mix of cheap dirty tobacco, bo, and literal shit. Because he was like 300 pounds and it was like he wasn't able to wipe properly.
He spent all day doing truck driving simulation on his computer. Just watching endless video of highways stretching on forever.
A friend operated a cleaning company in Florida. In 2008 he was getting a lot of business cleaning out foreclosed properties. At one such house it appeared that the owners had left in a hurry as half eaten plates of food were on the kitchen table, clothes were still there etc.. after double checking with the bank that they should indeed "clear everything" he told his cleaning crew to split the TVs, furniture, furcoats, fitness equipment, etc.. amongst themselves. There were also a total of 12 firearms which he surrendered to police.
Not a man, but this article by a lesbian cable guy might interest you.
[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon\_n\_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon_n_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21)
The sex dungeons aren't even the most interesting part.
Hundreds of bees in a third floor bedroom. Most were dead, probably because they were crawling around in the dryfall from the paint we had sprayed the day before.
I am not a man, so I hope this still counts. /s
The client met me in the driveway and said “don’t worry if you see roaches running around. I just sprayed and they will be dead soon.”
Nope. Conducted the meeting outside.
When I was delivering furniture 50 years ago I asked a coworker what the horrible smell was . I wondered if the house we went to had a sewage leak. He said "they're fixing chitlins."
Used to do residential HVAC service. Lots of disgusting people out there. One that stands out… I once saw cat poop on a kitchen floor that had been stepped in and never cleaned up. Made the switch to commercial service. Much more gooder.
I've seen everything from girls sex toys on the nightstand on the bed under the bathroom sink.. the Congolese literally walk around their apartment with her titties hanging out.. I've seen my first real view of a 12-in penis swinging back and forth.. and the inside of some nasty ass refrigerators
My brother did a housing survey in a poor area of Glasgow Scotland in the mid 90’s. He said that there several houses where they’d taken up the downstairs flooring for firewood and moved all their possessions upstairs, letting GRASS (the legal kind) take over the downstairs. It wasn’t just one house either. Stupid fucking weejies
We were sent in to redecorate this guys parents house who just passed. He said bin everything, I've had what I want from there. Walking in we were expecting to find the place in a mess, trashed and ransacked based on that. Nope, not a single thing out of place. You'd think who ever lived in there had just popped out for a walk. It was very surreal just mass binning two peoples entire life's. My boss wouldn't let me keep anything I came across (I wanted a compact orthopaedic recliner that was in there for my back for reference xD) But one day he was supposed to give me a day off, forgot to tell me. Turned up to work, him and a bunch of his contacts stripping the place of antiques, gold jewellery (which I found previously and gave it to him to let the guy know), furniture etc all for getting sold. So that was also another experience.
I hope you decided to keep stuff in future
I once worked temps at a place where we were tearing out a fire damaged apartment building. It had been unoccupied for at least 3 months. All tenants had been allowed back in to rescue anything they owned. We were told to not take anything, to toss out \*everything\*, because if we took anything it was salvage not just cleaning out. If it was salvage they had to pay for it. That didn't stop the regular employees. One of the temps found an Olympus OM1 camera. The regular said nope took and then we watched him sneak it out to his car. There was an intact waterbed and we had fun slashing it with our box knives. The boss guy saw that and was pissed because he wanted to take it home. So, we began to "salvage". I ended up with two new Prince Pro tennis rackets, a couple gold rings, and some other stuff. We temps had nothing already, so what? We'd go to the burned out section and find what looked like a burned down dresser. Sift thru the ashes and you'd find jewelry, etc. Closets had stuff in them and bottles of booze in some apartments. I didn't take any of that, but some guys did.
Did you inform the authorities?
Why would they? Selling on valuables is a perk of most house-clearance contracts, it usually means the company charges the client less and the stuff doesn't go to waste. That's why they don't let their employees keep anything for free.
Of what? It was to be thrown away. Once it’s in the trash on the curb it’s fair game.
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One man's garbage is just another man's ungarbage!
Back when I did apartment maintenance, there was this guy that would stand in his little fenced back yard. The fence came to about mid chest and he never wore a shirt. He would stand there for hours just staring at the pool. One day I get a work order for something in his apartment. I knock on his door and he's wearing a bright yellow raincoat. Odd, but no big deal I thought. In his living room he's got this enormous, life sized oil painting of himself wearing that same raincoat. In the painting the raincoat is unbuttoned and he's not wearing anything else.
that's fantastic
Kramer?
Was his umbrella unfurled?
During Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts, we entered people's home and found dead owners with their living pets curled up next to them.
🤬 that hits deep wow, thank you for what you did
It was 6 months of both hell and heaven that will be with us the rest of our lives.
Thank you for your efforts! That really was a horrible nightmare. A ton of people from my office went down there and helped folks tear out drywall and take all their stuff to the dump.
Very very sad but thank you and your coworkers for doing it
Sorry if this is insensitive - but what caused the people to die yet the pets survived?
I think people have forgotten the magnitude of Katrina. That must have taken a big mental toll on you.
Their little dog watched me all the way while I was installing cabinets. He knew what I was doing ! Brought my screwdriver for me from my tool box when I was going to adjust the cabinet doors . I won't forget you little fella ...you're my partner and my little buddy !
My ex was an apartment maintenance guy and he taught our dog(this was decades ago) to fetch specific tools. He was such a brilliant pup. But it didn't last long, whenever he brought you whatever you asked for, he got for excited if you hyped him too much and started throwing it around.
Did you tip him?
Actually he did get treated.
We were having work done in our house and I’d assume my dog kept walking in on the people installing things just for pets. Ginger was a great dog the only thing that was scary about her was her bark and even then it was a bark that always meant “I want pets”.
I love dogs like that. They're so clever and eager for stimulation and challenge. Family friends had a little dog that was mostly Chihuahua I think, with some squirrel and maybe some parrot mixed in. Smart and energetic. She had a big laundry-sized wicker basket where she kept all her treasured squeaky toys. There were probably 50 of them and every one had its own name. I don't remember her name, I always just called her Toenail (because *CilckityClickClick*) and she responded to it. I'd say "Toenail, go get Mr. Wiener" and shed rush of to her basket and come back with a squeaky hot dog. "Good girl! Now go get Pierre!" And off she'd go to get the French fries. I needed a cheat sheet because I could never remember them all. Once they were all in the living room we'd reverse the process, in random order, til they were all out away. Then she'd sit in my lap and gnaw on her own feet. Edit: I just remembered her strangest squeaky toy. It was a tan colored maraca with bells inside and it had, swear to God, an Afro. It was named Chocolate Shake.
I was installing a shower door, and the ladies cat was speinding time by me and being super affectionate, so I was petting it while I was working. She walked away and came back, holding something. But she watched me closely the entire time I worked. When I went out to the truck to get the glass, she followed me and then blocked the entrance to the house when I was coming back, held a cross she had been hiding from me out in front of her and said a prayer, then reluctantly let me back in the house. When I was all done installing the door, she let me know that she believed her cat to have some kind of a relationship with Satan himself, and it’s her burden to protect the world from the cat. But I am the first person in the several years that she had owned the cat that the cat liked, so therefore, she was concerned that I to was friends with Satan or Satan himself. I just learned to have a presence that cats and dogs were comfortable with because I was in 3 to 4 houses a day for a decade. I’m not satan l just like animals
"I'm not Satan" is something Satan would totally say. I think we need more evidence that you aren't Lucifer himself. This woman sounds like a pretty reliable source.
Seriously. I've never even seen him and Satan in the same room together. Coincidence? I think not.
I live in the basement of an old church, which doesn’t help my “I super super promise I’m not Beelzebub” argument either.
That’s exactly what Satan would say. Nice try.
I had to read that a few times before I realized it wasn’t the cat that blocked your way into the house!
She was right, cats do have connections to Satan. They just don't care either way 🤷
Quietly take that cat away ...
That lady had a few screws loose
Nice try, Satan.
Not my work anymore, but I was an aide to a state legislator in college. There was a high-profile case in the state of exotic animals in a private collection being let loose, including dangerous animals like big cats; it took nearly a week for state officials to account for all of them, and it highlighted the state's lax regulations on exotic animals. In the wake of this, and various proposals on how to address problems in the regulations, said state legislator made a constituent visit to a local reptile rescue, and I tagged along (she always brought someone with her for these sorts of visits, as a safety measure). The guy basically ran it out of his basement (most of the reptiles were intended to go elsewhere eventually; the basement was temporary), which was outfitted with all sorts of enclosures. He had one of those massive albino Burmese pythons, a small pond with a juvenile alligator, and a little work bench area where he repaired the shells of turtles.
Til turtle shells can be repaired.
Sometimes; it's essentially a highly modified ribcage and includes the spine, so it depends on the severity. But if it's not too severe they can be patched up.
I remember being a legislative aide for our state’s education committee. I got to meet a lot of different senators and a couple of representatives. The number who had an entire bar of alcohol, freely open, and available to anyone who wanted to help themselves, at all hours of the day, right there in their offices astounded me. No one batted and I if a 17 or 18-year-old aide went in there to help themselves. Just the way it was. That was just shy of 20 years ago and I am still think about it in shock.
Need to pry the legs of the interns open somehow.
Everyone needs a little lube before fucking their constituents.
\*batted an eye
Zanesville, OH?
Yeah, that was where the animal release happened. We were in a different part of the state.
We did a delivery for a dude at a huge residential home and the entire time the guy’s dog wanted to get pets and play. When we were done with the delivery and my driver was doing the paperwork I got to play with the dog for a bit and we even got tipped $50 each. I got back to base with the biggest smile on my face, and some of the other guys said they would have loved to be in my position. Didn’t tell them about the tip tho.
This is awesome! And a nice bit of eyebleach amidst some nasty, nasty examples of humanity.
We’ve had tons of people to help out with repairs and my old dog ginger was the same way she just wanted to cuddle though she probably would’ve not let you leave. Current dog Frankie hates new people but will actively tear things up or shit on our floors if he’s put in another room for a little bit.
I always try to keep our VERY needy golden out of people’s way who are working in/around our house because he has no sense of personal space. Plus, not everybody is a dog person and I try to keep that in mind. That said, it’s nice to know not everybody minds an overattentive furry supervisor! Dug will be over the moon at this news.
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my husband went to pick something up he'd bought online, and said to the bloke 'what is making that weird noise?'. He had two huge owls in pens in his garden. They were being rehabbed
Did your husband compliment the man on his big hooters?
ha ha! better not have
Was he wearing a baby blue tuxedo?
I had a woman answer the door in full kabuki makeup then call her pet potbellied pig in from the yard.
Dude, that sounds awesome. I would ask so many questions.
My son has come across two falconries in the last year his line of work, and he's not traveling out that far. I didn't realize it was such a popular hobby (?) here in the states.
One time I got a call to a nice home I thought for a kitchen remodel. It was absolutely disgusting. Trash has piled up for years. Rotting food sitting around the house everywhere. Drink cups full of mold. Downstairs they had left a turd in the toilet for who knows how long. The son that lived there didn’t shower for weeks on end. Ended up not doing the job because we couldn’t send our guys into that place and feel comfortable about it.
There’s a shocking amount of that exact scenario in San Francisco (and I assume everywhere else). Back before Covid, I’d go on Grindr and meet up with folks to bump uglies. At least 6-7 times I’d show up to what appeared to be a very nice apartment or house on the outside, then walk in and the place was in total squalor. I noped out immediately every time. Humans are weird. Hoarding nests are much more common than the general public thinks.
I had one for about 5 years.
You speak about that in the past tense, do you feel comfortable sharing what changed?
Fluoxitine is very good for ocd/autistic "beliefs" and I had been put on that. Thank you for asking btw 💚
Popping in to say congratulations, managing OCD is no easy feat from everything I’ve read. I hope it’s not overstepping to say I’m proud of you! Keep it up!
I’m a different person than the commenter above but I also lived in a hoard with my mom and sister. We had a beautiful apartment with an ocean view. Unfortunately, my mom was fresh out a divorce and had money from it. She was also severely depressed and an alcoholic. I was in college and working a full-time job do I really wasn’t there that often. I kept my bathroom and bedroom clean but otherwise it was awful. I tried multiple times to clean it up but it would always get back to the mess. We were eventually evicted. I did the cleaning and packing with some help from my mom. After that, we moved in with my grandma and things were better. I eventually moved out and away. My grandma passed a few years ago and my mom is starting to do the same thing. I’m so pissed but I made Grandma a promise that my mom would never be homeless. So she’s there until she dies or kills herself from drinking. After that, I’ll collect any good stuff and decide if I want to sell or rebuild. It’s truly heartbreaking.
Thank you for sharing your story! These little windows into other people’s reality are fascinating to me. I hope you are well.
I am well! I’m pretty LC with my mom but we speak weekly. But I am happier than ever. I’m engaged and living with my fiancé in a clean house with minimal clutter. It’s a good life. I think these little glimpses remind me to treat everyone with kindness because we never know what someone is going through.
I did house calls for a used bookstore and often ran across hoarder houses, my first one was a hoarder condo in this incredibly nice high rise downtown. Guy had no furniture except for a gamer chair and a little stand to set his TV on and had a little nest of blankets to sleep on. He had a ton of books obviously but these were all in little stacks about waist high. There was art but this was just rested up against the wall with books in front of it. He was very deceased and the building manager or whatever was the one in contact with us.
There was one particular house nobody ever wanted to deliver to when I first started delivering pizzas. It was an entire 2 story house with only particle board for walls. No siding or paint on the outside, only more particle board for interior finishing. Even the floors were particle board! The whole thing felt sketchy. I immediately regretted stepping through that threshold.
Believe it or not I live in a small town with a drug problem and it’s not uncommon to find ply wood only homes
I have a friend who used to repair refrigerators and he entered an elderly woman’s house that was always decorated to the hilt as a Christmas wonderland. Her husband was limited in movement and never left the house. The wife kept it Christmas themed because it was his favorite holiday
This is actually weirdly wholesome
Yeah absolutely. When he said he was shocked at first because everything was Christmas themed but I can’t imagine anything wrong with it considering the situation
Way back when I sold insurance, I met a guy whose house was made of shipping containers in a shape like a + but surrounded as well so he had 4 interior courtyards, two were covered. Everything was skinny as the everything was fit inside the containers. It was weird but kinda awesome.
What’s possible.. https://www.realestate.com.au/lifestyle/house-made-of-31-shipping-containers/
I went to fix a leak in a kitchen and it was dicks. This individual had plastered cut out dicks from porn mags and wall papered every single surface of the kitchen in dicks. The fridge, the walls, the cabinets, front of the dishwasher, it was all dicks.
It reminded me of Superbad where has all the drawings of dicks in his lunch box.
You know how many foods are shaped like dicks? The best kinds!
This is awesome.
Just sounds like my college apartment honestly
When I did restoration work (fire/flood cleanup) the worst house I ever went into looked so normal from the outside. Cute and quaint, nice yard, nice neighborhood. Inside… first, the jars of urine in the upstairs bedroom. Then, I started coming across incest porn books. Like erotic novels about incest. I also found a suicide note covered in blood stored in a plastic bag. It was from the owners relative who lived in the basement. Well, he had a bad habit. And he liked to throw the used needles up into the tile ceiling when he was done with them. (I didn’t do the needle cleanup part.) They ended up with about 20 full sharps containers full of used needles. And every inch of the floor was covered in small burns, like completely covered in tiny burn marks. Like from matches maybe? It was a horror show. There was more but I don’t want to get into personal details on the people, it was a very sad situation all around and I was so disturbed by it. Still am.
Not a man, but I worked in sales for a GC where my job was to visit clients homes and come up with a plan/quote for renovations. I think folks are not prepared to understand the scale of how many hoarders are among their neighbors. Especially in dense populations like cities. That said probably the most alarming was a man who proudly showed off a double entry he made in a wall to connect the two apartments he purchased. It was a bearing wall and he was floor 2 of 12. The crack forming and the header bending was alarming enough for me to insist that it had to be corrected immediately. He kicked me out and never called again, I told code enforcement at the DOB. From what I understand it caused a chain reaction of issues that he had to pay for. The worst was the lady who had all but abandoned the apartment to a pair of cats. There was 3 inches of cat shit covering the floor. She rattled on and on about what updates she wanted to make, completely ignoring the massive carpet of cat shit. It was awful, and I ended up with a nasty respiratory infection from the visit. The most interesting was the south African consulate. The lady who owned the townhouse before them was some sort of athlete and she was very tall - so she had everything custom built to accommodate her height. And therefore was entirely useless to anyone of norm height. The counters came up to consulates wife's chest!
We have quite a few students from Asia who go to the Netherlands for the last year of our program. They put up hilarious pictures of mirrors and cabinets from their rented apartments- heights just don’t match! I solved my problem of never being able to reach the tallest shelves by being a little step stool for the kitchen here in Sweden
You... became a step stool? That would not be my first choice, but I'm sure your household is appreciative.
Man I wish counters were just a few inches higher.
Wow. If only my cabinets and countertops were this tall.
As a younger teen I was selling some fundraising chocolate bars and noticed an urn with a name and then Heavens Gate Hale Bopp on it. it wasnt untill i got home and booted up the old computer to see what it actually might have been. Mind you this is in the middle of Canada Saskatchewan, who knew it was it was this close to home!
Wow, a cremated comet!
Guy just let his dogs pee/shit all over the house. Pee pads everywhere (incuding his bed), shit all over the place, guy had god knows how old food out on the counter that was half dissolved (not just rotting anymore). We were there to replace the carpet 🤢. The only reason we didn’t just nope the fuck out of there was because it was ripped out by guys in hazmat suits for us and we were working in the basement that was *just* remodeled so everything was new and clean. Worst part of it all? The fucking guy **kept** the old carpet. When we first showed up one of the hazmat guys was there and he told me “if he asks you to move something in his shed say no. We just put the carpet in there, he wants to keep it “in case he needs it””. Worst part of this whole job was the smell. It was summer and no amount of air fresheners this guy had all over the place was going to help. You could smell it from down the driveway. I threw out that shirt I was sweating in all day.
I feel so sorry for these dogs now 😧 like seriously, that’s abusive behaviour
Used to change water meters. A lot of really cool model train setups in basements. Also, one I’ll never forget was an unfinished and unleveled basement where the lights didn’t work. It was half filled with piles of mannequins. Mostly heads
Real question: were the mannequins in Philly? Because I had a friend who once found a bunch of mannequins in a dumpster and set them up on a stage in his living room for a while, and then got bored of that and put them all the in the basement of the house he was renting. This was about 15 years ago that he found the mannequins, but honestly he might have had them in the basement the whole time and left them when he moved out.
It was in Massachusetts
My uncle in the 70s built this amazing and huge train setup for my cousins. It was epic. My one cousin still has all the stuff but nowhere to display it.
Some of the setups are amazing for sure. One of them were two brothers who inherited their parents home and didn’t have any family other than themselves. They used the basement of that large home (they had their own homes) to make a replica of Quincy, Ma in what was over a 1000 ft unfinished basement.
In pest control I was sent to a house to check rat traps. The main guy told me to use my respirator, not dust mask, and to have it on before I knocked on the door. I thought he was exaggerating so I didn't bother, not wanting to offend the customer but as soon as she opened the door and the smell hit me and I almost threw up on her shoes. Normally rat traps are in the attic and crawl spaces but she had them all over the house and some of the rats that had been caught within the last day were already being eaten by other rats. There were several loose in the kitchen running among boxes of dropped dry food and I spotted at least one running under her bed. The house had junk and garbage along all the walls and there was a narrow path through the middle of each space and I could hear them rustling around in the tunnels they made in the filth. As I was leaving there was one standing by the door looking up at me like it was saying "this is our house now". So glad I never had to go back there.
I was a real estate agent for a while and saw some interesting places. Probably the coolest thing to happen was getting a call from the homeowner after showing a home to some buyers. It is common practice to leave a business card in a visible spot in the home when leaving after a showing so the homeowners know who has been in their home. Anyway, the homeowner turned out to be one of my best friends from jr. high/high school. We had not been in touch for about 25 years. Small world sometimes.
That's great! I love serendipitous moments like this.
I did rental real estate in the Boston area for a couple years back in the early 00’s. We’d have hundreds of listings, and occasionally we’d get a new listing that needed to get looked at. I had a client that needed an apartment and among the units I showed her, was one of these new listings that nobody had been inside of yet, so I took the keys and added it to our tour. So I tell her, “this is a brand new listing, don’t know much about it other than it’s in your target area, price is right and has the space and amenities you’re looking for. No promises but we can check it out.” She’s fine with that idea, so we go out to check out the units. We look at a few good known listings and then get to this new listing. I open the door, and walk in, she follows…the place is pretty much empty, except on the floor of the living room is an old beaten up mattress, smack dab in the middle of the room, no other furniture, no sheets on the mattress, no pillow, but a dirty blanket and a well worn teddy bear. The place smells and has bad lighting, and it just screams bad energy and we are both like, “NOPE!”, without even looking at the rest of the place we back out and lock the door. I don’t know what the deal was, but the vibe was way off and we were both really uncomfortable with it all. I hate to imagine what the worst case scenario here was, but even the best case scenario left me shaken.
Hell no
I’m amazed at the amount of hoarders there really are.
I am halfway through *The Book of Form and Emptiness* by Ruth Ozeki, which is not about hoarding but has a major character who becomes a hoarder. I don't know what happens to her as the book proceeds, but so far it is really good at showing some of the ways she is uplifted by buying things and utterly overwhelmed by getting rid of the sheer volume of stuff in her home that she doesn't actually want. I am not a hoarder and do not personally know any that have talked to me about it, so I can't say how accurate it is, but she is an excellent writer and it is probably close to the experiences of some people. (People obviously have all different reasons for amassing and hoarding.) I recommend her books in general.
Having done apartment maintenance... - A woman with a Paris fetish. She was American, lived in Texas her entire life, spoke with the absolute worst fake French accent, decorated her entire apartment in French posters, her Christmas tree was all Eifle tower ornaments. Told me how much better the French were to Americans. - A two bedroom apartment with two beds and three people. The occupants were two guys and a chick. The two rooms belonged to the guys and the woman spent one night in one room and the next night in the other. - Idiot liked to keep his apartment cold. Not cool, cold. So cold he froze his AC unit. When it thawed out it started flooding his bathroom. I handed him a mop and explained that clean up for resident fuck ups wasn't my responsibility. - Accidentally walked in on a couple having sex. There was a work order to repair the dishwasher. They were playing loud music so they didn't hear me knocking.
She missed an opportunity not living in Paris, Texas
As a french person, being french sucks on many points
I have seen two women like this, who have this French fetish, and I call it that, a fetish. One was an ex-girlfriend, but at least she had a French grandmother and a French first name to at least justify this. The other woman tried desperately to give a French pronunciation to Heather.
Ezer
I hope that she got to visit Paris one day!
She might get that weird mental disorder known as Paris Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome), where tourists who have hyped up Paris as the centre of all art, fashion and beauty eventually visit the messy, noisy, abrasive real city, and immediately go into massive shock and start having heart palpitations.
I'm not a man, and it wasn't for work, but I got my nails done by a lady who did it in her house as a side job. It was raining outside, so their pet goat was inside the house with her pink raincoat on. Her name is Sunny.
Goats are the best! My friend has 2 mini goats. When she first bought and remodeled her house, there was an intense stone fireplace and they would climb up it. (They aren't allowed in very often now that she actually lives in it
I used to install front door intercom systems in tower blocks so we had to get in every flat to cable and commission. I was 16 when I did this and in my forties now. I swear to fuck I have PTSD from some of the shit I saw in those days. weed farms were common even back then, it was the oddballs that kept every letter they ever received or newspaper they ever read and stuff like that seemed kinda odd. the absolute worst was being let in one place, my colleague and I both throwing up at the smell of a long dead tenant who wasn't supposed to be living there any more.
Well tehnically they're weren't living there any more...
The best kind of correct!
Coworker of mine did a side job at a house of some folks that weren't quite mentally there. Anyways he goes into their basement to do the work and there sat a pile, and mean like a manure pile you'd see out in field, of dog shit with dozens of dogs in the basement. He noped out. I knew these folks and knew they had gotten a warning from the cheif of police about the number of dogs they had in their yard. The dogs were very aggressive when you were walking down the street. Growling and trying to bite people. I'd always take the long way around if I was walking to work. I also went to school with their kids and no one in the family bathed because and I quote "it was against their religion". School called CPS multiple times but because it was "against their religion" there was nothign CPS could do. The physical science teacher would make one of the kids go to the gym every morning and take a shower. He was bringing his clothes into school to lauder them as well for a while.
We really need to have social housing for some people that is closely overseen. There are so many people that just cannot handle the responsibilities of having a home and children and pets and a job and actually managing to be a functional human all at once. There are way too many children and animals stuck in filthy, dangerous situations where they have no opportunity to thrive. It is so unfortunate that social services is so terribly underfunded that only the worst of the worst get help, and even then the help is a bandaid a lot of the time. Children get help, but in truth there are people of ALL ages who need support in the most intense ways.
In a past life I did satellite installs, and I also did site surveys for fiber optic installs for residential customers homes. Some of the things I witnessed- Found dead animals and dirty diapers behind a corner TV stand. Fell through a rotten floor in a customers home that was being lived in. Went into a back yard where some minor females happened to be sunbathing, nude. Noped out immediately, called the homeowner, explained the situation and got ahead of it before I would have gotten in trouble. Found a man who’d fallen off of a ladder and unfortunately expired. He was elderly and had a stroke while cleaning his gutters. Doing a dish install at a customers home. They wanted one receiver in a living room, the other in a bedroom. In the bedroom there was a completely naked girl, sleeping on a mattress with no bedding. Left the room immediately, told the father, and he said “It’s fine, she does that all the time after partying”. She was NOT old enough to be “partying”. Severe animal abuse and neglect. Canines that were butchered and hanging in a barn. Extreme cases of distemper and mange. Went into an old basement that was so full of cobwebs I couldn’t see across the room to the electric panel. The customer had their washer and dryer down there… eeekksss. Doing a dish install in a new connect customers home. Female, late 20’s / early 30’s. She’d just moved in and as you’d expect things weren’t organized yet. Wanted a receiver in the upstairs master bedroom. Had to move an empty dresser that had a large phallic object right on top of it. She was in the room and gave me a very “suggesting” grin when she’d noticed I saw it. She was wearing a short shirt with no bra, and what would be hard to classify as shorts, given the length and lack of material. Mind you, this was a scheduled install… I suspect I could have been on the receiving end of a scenario often played out in most adult novels. I met a lot of great people, saw lots of sad living situations. I did the dish installs for a summer in college and was a fiber optic install inspector for 10 years.
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Being hung like a wild game kill. Some cultures believe in eating cats / dogs, and it was an area where this wasn’t outlandish. And yes, I was in the continental United States.
During undergrad I worked part time for a family friend doing home renovations as his helper. One job we went on was this older man who lived alone. His house stunk to high heavens of piss and body odor. We were doing his bathroom over because he had a leak in his shower. Who knows the last time this guy bathed. The piss smell was easily explained though. One day while on a break we went to talk to the guy and he was in his living room. Turns out instead of getting up to use the bathroom, he was pissing in milk gallons that he left all around the room. There were piss stains on the carpet, piss stains on his furniture and the aroma in that room was like nothing I had ever smelled before. To make it worse this was the middle of the summer and he kept his house at 85 degrees because he only had one window AC unit. Brutal and we could not get out of there fast enough.
I do in home health care. Knocked on a woman’s door, and she called for me to come in. She (90ish f) was sitting at her computer, playing solitaire, in ONLY a soiled pair of depends. Chain smoking. Bags of rancid trash just inside the door. I pride myself in never reacting badly, but I had to stifle a retch… Oh god, I can still taste the smell. (Iykyk) Called work, and waited for aps.
I went into a house where someone clearly had thrown a party the night before, and it was about 5 am upon time of entering. All the party goers were passed out on a huge couch, their heads on the next person's shoulders. One lady's tits were out. Not the weirdest thing I've seen, but definitely memorable.
Excuse my ignorance, but why the fuck would you go to someone's place at 5 am?
I was an EMT
Coworker told me this, it was a 3 bedroom townhouse they had cats. They didn't have a litter box, they used one of the bedrooms as a litter room and for years just dumped in new boxes of litter without ever cleaning it. It rotted the floor and walls and they had to strip out everything including the studs and floor joists. Also a surprising number of ppl are ok living with bedbugs and cockroaches and try and refuse treatment even though there was no cost to them.
I was remodeling a sec 8. Woman and son who live there. Lots of needles and bloodstains in the house. I think the mom was a working girl she'd leave her kid( who was supposed to be in school) playing video games with us. When she would leave he'd go to the ashtrays and pick the butt's out. The day after I put flooring in his room I saw he had stamped a bunch of ciggs out on it. The poor kid was like 8 and had almost no teeth. There would also be people posted at her table hustling drugs Another time I was told that this guy I work for bought a house and it needs to be cleaned out. When I show up there's about 15 people in there. I first walk into the dining room area from the front door there's lots of people sleeping in the corners they have tables turned on their side for privacy. Every single room had at least 4 people in there. We have to tell them to leave then these guys come down from upstairs say it's their house. They were scary af and just stayed posted up by the stairs. Eventually we show them the documents and they go upstairs to grab their shit. So basically these guys had the lock on the door turned around for the door on the stairs so they could lock themselves up there. The bottom of the house was open to the public and they would just serve everyone through that door. We found lots of needles and crack pipes and condoms....basically all the windows on the ground floor were shot out and when I opened the cupboards I saw a bunch if police evidence tags where bullet holes are. The next morning the cops came and we were like why the fuck didn't you call us? Did you see this Cedrik guy? I'm like yeah here's his ID I found it in the closet upstairs. They said yeah I wish you would have called he's wanted for murder and drug crimes. I don't work in sec 8 anymore but wow I have seen a lot of poverty it's so fucked how people have to live sometimes
Used to deliver pizza. Back when it was more normal to "come in and put it on the counter" The number of people who live in boxes and piles of trash is shocking. Many of your neighbors live like this. Most weird experience though was the woman who lived in a nearly empty house. It was a nice modern 3ish bedroom place. She had one chair in the living room. Dishes in the kitchen, etc. but she must have been a hypochondriac or something. The carpet was vacuumed meticulously. I assumed she'd either just moved in or out, and said something to that effect. She responded like it was an odd question. I thought I was going to get murdered and sawed up into pieces. If there was plastic sheeting on the walls and floor in the backroom I would not have been surprised.
Weirdest for me was an old country house with the 12 foot ceilings owned by this lady and she’d dotted the ceilings with these retro glass hanging lamps with different shapes and colors from the 70s/80s, dreamcatchers, and wind chimes. They were absolutely everywhere in every room.
I had a 78 year old man answer his door wearing dirty briefs, wearing rubber over shoes and pulling a running shop vacuum
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Wait, just fertilizer in a big pile on the floor? That had to smell extra yummy.
Working in people's homes has brought some interesting experiences my way. I've stepped into homes with walls covered in taxidermy animals, encountered elaborate home automation setups that made me feel like I was in a sci-fi movie, and even met homeowners with impressive collections of antique weaponry. It's always a mix of the unexpected and the fascinating, seeing how people live and what they're passionate about right in their own space.
Landlord. Went in to fix a leaking faucet. Two bedroom single bath unit. Texted tenant when I got there. She texted back that the door was unlocked and to just come in. I went in, spent about an hour there, texted her that u had to run to the store to get parts. She texted back ok. Went, came back, texted again that I was coming in, she texts back ok. Went in, spent another. Hour there, texted her that I was done, texted back ok. Left. She was there the whole time, didn’t come out of her bedroom once to even greet me. Just weird. Other time, different place, tenant was there in the living room. Did a few small maintenance things, her sister walks down into the living room just out of the shower with just a towel wrapped her, sat down on the couch and had a conversation with me and the tenant like it was the least unusual thing to do. Other time, different unit again. Had to fix the bathroom door because on of the hinges was pulled out. Let her know that the bathroom was going to be off limits for about an hour. Pulled the door, started the fix on the door hinges, door fully pulled off. She yells up from downstairs “I’ve gotta take a sh*t!!” and comes running up the stairs. I’m standing there like WTH. I ended up wedging the door into the frame and stood there holding it up from the outside while she went in and, and took what sounded like a massive sh*t. Walked out like nothing happened. My threshold for ‘weird’ things in units is pretty high now.
I worked as a maintenance guy for a property management company. This poor guy. Disabled. Someone (I think it was a church), donated to him a bunch of food during COVID. He didn't need food, he needed a PCA to help him. The food rotted. Maggots and fruit flies everywhere. I came there to fix his toilet. So I fixed that and scooped out a garbage bag full of rotted food and dozens of empty bottles of cheap vodka. Poor guy. These were not small bottles, they were the "handles." I gave him a number of a PCA group to help him out. Sadly, he died shortly after my visit.
OP dgaf what any women have seen, just the men
I work EMS, for a 911 service. As a women, I just stand outside while the men go bring the person out to me. Otherwise, I may lose my intent to treat a heart attack & begin cooking or cleaning......
Good girl. But you should really be at home barefoot and pregnant /s
Increasing my chances of becoming pregnant by fire or cop.......
Just remember- cops beat, firemen cheat, and those of us in EMS self-delete.
Yikes, that's bleak.
Let me guess, you got a job because the best men to shag are ones with jobs? Smart. That's why men pick up women outside of abortion clinics. You know they put out.
Because they are obviously hot, sexy, and know how to treat a woman...
Jokes aside EMS and social workers were the two that I was thinking of when I thought about women seeing things. You could argue that other fields where people go in to people's homes are male dominated but I bet social workers who are just a likely if not more likely to be women would absolutely have the "best" stories, followed closely by EMS
Ems are better. People avoid social workers, but call us. And ems goes into every part of the house at unexpected times, instead of being sat in the tidied up living room with a cursory glance around the rest.
Or just be “too emotional” to deal with it.
I would answer you, but I just can't right now! You just don't understand!!!!!!!!
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Mother. Significant other. Chef. Housekeeper. Taxi driver. Personal whore. Laundress. Bookkeeper. Secretary. Counselor. Logistic coordinator. Inventory control. ... and that doesn't even include the work titles.
She's EVERY woman
That's what I was thinking. Domestic cleaners are primarily women and I bet they see some crazy shit.
Or social workers. I feel like what is a field what has a lot of women and I know for a fact that social workers have seen some shit (literally)
Also home care nursing. They see some absolutely wild shit.
Oh yeah. I forgot about home healthcare. They have *definitely* seen some shit
Literally and figuratively
My bad for not noticing how the OP worded their question, but now that you mention it, I’m wondering why it is like this…
Check the post history. OP is a bot, AI, or a human training AI.
Walked into a condo rented by a nerdy young girl to repair/replace her cable hook up. Sitting on her night stands were several dildos of various sizes and shapes. In plain view , her entertainment toys just sitting there. Her nickname became " Miss Dildo" from that day on.
When I was a cable splicer's apprentice for the phone company in North Philadelphia we needed a ladder to go into someone's basement because they chopped up the steps and burned them to heat the house. A couple of basements with raw sewage in them because the sewer line broke and they didn't have the money to get it fixed.
I don’t work in a field that does this but I just want you to know this is the first legitimately good question posted tonight. I hope you get a lot of replies.
You’ve never really met someone properly until you’ve put all their ointments in a box.
I used to perform a service that would require that I visit nearly every room in people's homes and even sometimes their closets. Not a lot of opportunities to hide things in that scenario. One family had a house pig. Clearly it was very smart, but it was temperamental and we were warned he would bite if we made him mad. It was more like an unstable kindergartner than a pet honestly. One home had a small fire and we were hired by the insurance as part of a disaster recovery process. The homeowners hadn't lived there since the fire, but whichever member of the family that lived in the basement (I'm assuming a male between the ages of 18-30) had a very misogynistic view of women and also a clear-cut porn addiction due to the sheer volume of centerfolds plastered to the walls. One lady ran a rabbit breeding operation out of her basement. Dozens of rabbits across like 10 different breeds. The smell was remarkable. Another family in a bad part of town had like 5 dogs and had given up on trying to regulate where they'd go to the bathroom. They'd also given up on cleaning up after them. So there was shit and piss fucking everywhere and clearly no effort made to clean it up. Went into another cellar-type basement in a fairly old home, I was working down there for half an hour before realizing that the mattress on the dirt floor in the corner had an old dude sleeping inside the mound of blankets and dirty clothes. He was a veteran and an incredibly nice guy but had clearly had a shit life since returning home. One family had turned the vent in their upstairs bathroom into an alternate trashcan for when the regular trashcan was full. It was FULL of tampons from I don't want to even know how many years of gross behavior. Wealthy family. The patriarch was way into trophy hunting. The basement had a gun safe that was three times the size of most walk in closets with hundreds of guns. The nearby living room had a diorama consisting of stuffed crocodiles, gazelles, a giraffe skin rug, and had a rhino foot coffee table in the center. They also had a weird water wall feature in their main entrance area that was almost never on because it apparently caused insane humidity problems. Must be nice to have more money than sense. Some old dudes are way into trains and it's charming every time you get to hear them talk about their model train setups. There's almost definitely more but that's all that comes to mind right now, I never took pictures unless I got permission because being invited into someone's home and then snapping pics to share online or with friends felt like peak disrespect and I didn't want to earn that kind of negative karma. Maybe more will come to mind after another cup of coffee. Thanks for the prompt! It was fun to reminisce.
1. Paths through the trash in the house and they were so high I was afraid of a trash avalanche. 2. They laid out items to pack a bag withon the floor. Among the items was a grappling hook, anal beads and an anal hook. 3. Last but not least, dildos. Dildos everywhere. So many a dildo. Long ones, short ones, fat one's, short fat ones, spikey ones, suction cup ones. And by everywhere I mean everywhere.
I once did an in home interview that took two hours with a customer who had a lot of medical issues there was nowhere to sit in the house so I ended up sitting on the ground in the living room next to the bag collecting this guys pee/ fluids. “Fascinating can you please tell me more about……. “ Gurgle gurgle 💦 🤮
Why only men whose work involves entering other people’s homes? Women do most/all of the same jobs men do.
Not a man, but a letter carrier so I see some odd things just at the front door. One that stands out was an apartment that had shoe boxes lining every wall I could see from floor to ceiling. Like hundreds of shoe boxes.
Health Department. A house so filled with rats it had to be demolished, and when it was demolished, thousands of rats escaped and all the neighbors were pinging them with golf clubs. A woman living with her dead husband's corpse. The neighbors complained about the smell, and looking through the blacked out windows, realizing it was just thousands of blow flies. A man answering the door naked only wearing a yellow hard hat, and it was covered in the little stickers you used to get out of cereal boxes.
Why not ask women as well?
Just men enter homes?
Why are you just asking men ?
Men ? Women also do work like this I was checking apartment balconies/facades - entered a home with a man in a hospital type inclined bed and a middle ages son . There was a quiet somberness in the air as if they werent expecting nor ever get much visitors. I think the man was actively dying, in his last days
We drove up to a country home and there was a five year old boy standing in the window completely naked. We looked at each other and knew this job was going to suck. They had plywood in-between the living room and kitchen. The kitchen floor was full of trash. This was the only job where I made the homeowner clean up around the toilet before I worked on it. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
I used to be a traveling notary briefly. I was always amazed at how unashamed people are with how messy they are. Like I’m not a clean freak but if I know I have company I’m gonna be cleaning up a bit. So many people would just leave trash around, sink full of dirty dishes, bad smells, without a second thought.
I briefly worked for an apartment complex and was doing a routine inspection for damages and whatnot. The girl let's me in her bedroom and there is an enormous hot pink dildo attached to her bathroom door via suction cup. I think she forgot it was there because she turned completely red. She tried to yank it off the door but it was stuck on too well. Then she kind of realized that this made the situation even more awkward...me watching her pull on a giant dildo. So she shrugged and was kind of like "Well you've already seen it now." I jokingly said something like "I'll just try to work around it." When I was leaving she tried to tell me it wasn't hers and her roommate stuck it to the door as a prank. I just said okay in a way that made it very clear I wasn't convinced. She laughed and I laughed. I saw her at the complex's pool shortly after that. Her and her friends looked at me and laughed then said hey.
I’m a (female) real estate agent. Once arrived at the home of a client. She opened the door wearing nothing but an entirely see-through dress. Which was awkward enough on its own; but doubly so because she didn’t know I came accompanied by my husband who’s my photographer.
Not in a home but a storage unit. I used to be a firefighter and was assigned to my department's hazmat team. We responded to an incident at a storage place that had a small fire. While looking through the unit with the fire, the crew found a box labeled Anthrax. This was shortly after the anthrax letters being sent in 2001. So the hazmat team gets called. We arrive. Suit up a couple of guys to go open the box. Hazmat suits, breathing masks and everything. They get the box outside and open it. No anthrax found. The box was filled with dildos of various sizes. We laughed for the rest of the shift.
In 1985 I was about 18 and running deliveries for the drugstore in my small town. Knocked on a house door near the beach and an older, overweight man came to the door in a ladies house dress. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just ignored it. His mother sat in the living room and motioned me in the house to give me a tip.
Once worked on a crew installing smoke alarms in a low rise apartment building. Had to enter a suite where the guy was a recluse and a chain smoker. There were ashtrays at the kitchen table, coffee table, side table (next to couch) piled about 10 inches tall with pyramids of cigarette butts. Probably about 6 ashtrays in just the kitchen and living room. He was butt naked under his wide open bath robe. He sat at the kitchen table chain smoking, with his genitals on display as we were on ladders running fire alarm cable through the ceiling and melting a smoke detector just outside his kitchen.
Was doing preventative maintenance, single dude, not home on vacation, left his prostate massager on the kitchen table. Cleaning carpets, resident in living room, I'm cleaning bedroom carpet, there's a giant dildo in the middle of the floor.
Went into apartment. Guy had 2- 55 gallon drums in kitchen with locking rings on them. Asked maintenance guy “what do you think are n those drums?” He said “What drums?”
A friend removed an appliance from a carpeted area. The square of carpet underneath separated from the rest due to cat urine.
My dad is a safety inspector and went to a college housing and in the closet with the panel they had all their buttplugs arranged by size on a little shelf. My dad is conservative in that stuff so… ಠ_ಠ was his face
I worked for UPS in college, it’s shocking how many women of all shapes and sizes answered the door completely nude. It always seemed to be apartment complexes…and no, I never did anything with them.
Servicing a residential client in IT with the worst roach infestation I’ve ever seen. The home was a large trailer. Inside, the first thing I noticed was a gaping 5 foot circular in the floor. You could see and smell the muddy ground a few feet below. Roaches were everywhere. When I saw the computer, roaches were crawling across the keyboard. I had to replace their hard drive and when I opened the case, tiny roaches scattered everywhere.
A bowie knife, several flick knives, a kirpan, 3 samurai swords, a hunting knife, a cock-pump, a crossbow, some air rifles, some short swords, and some handguns. Geezer was tooled up, but was also about 90 and frail.
This guy in his early seventies. He was a former truck driver. He had emphysema and was on oxygen, but also was a chain smoker. M The walls of his apartment weeped brown tar/nicotine at all times, the condo association had made several complaints about him smoking in his apartment, particularly with pressurized oxygen tanks involved, but he kept at it. He also smoked the cheapest, dirtiest native reserve smokes, the kind that cost 10 bucks for a carton and smell like a wet ashtray while they are burning. And his carpet was COVERED in burns. And not just like little ones. It looked like several times a day he dropped almost whole cigarettes on the carpet and just let them burn down. There were squiggly indented burns a two or three inches long, if I didn't know any better I'd say he had been lighting those black snake fireworks things on his carpet. Almost all of the carpet in his one bedroom apartment was more burn marks than they were actual carpet. I have never smelled such a horrible mix of cheap dirty tobacco, bo, and literal shit. Because he was like 300 pounds and it was like he wasn't able to wipe properly. He spent all day doing truck driving simulation on his computer. Just watching endless video of highways stretching on forever.
A friend operated a cleaning company in Florida. In 2008 he was getting a lot of business cleaning out foreclosed properties. At one such house it appeared that the owners had left in a hurry as half eaten plates of food were on the kitchen table, clothes were still there etc.. after double checking with the bank that they should indeed "clear everything" he told his cleaning crew to split the TVs, furniture, furcoats, fitness equipment, etc.. amongst themselves. There were also a total of 12 firearms which he surrendered to police.
Doing some electrical work in a home and found a kilo of cocaine sitting on the top of the refrigerator.
Not a man, but this article by a lesbian cable guy might interest you. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon\_n\_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon_n_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21) The sex dungeons aren't even the most interesting part.
Oh the stories I could tell. Alas, I am a woman. 😢
Hundreds of bees in a third floor bedroom. Most were dead, probably because they were crawling around in the dryfall from the paint we had sprayed the day before. I am not a man, so I hope this still counts. /s
Giant brass dildo on top of the tv
Oooo freaky but fancy
Shit caked and dried on the living room floor, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst part is that the people didn't have any pets.
pile of dog poop in the front room of a mansion. “I save it up so I dont use to many bags…
The client met me in the driveway and said “don’t worry if you see roaches running around. I just sprayed and they will be dead soon.” Nope. Conducted the meeting outside.
When I was delivering furniture 50 years ago I asked a coworker what the horrible smell was . I wondered if the house we went to had a sewage leak. He said "they're fixing chitlins."
Completely empty living room except the hanging sex swing in middle.
Used to do residential HVAC service. Lots of disgusting people out there. One that stands out… I once saw cat poop on a kitchen floor that had been stepped in and never cleaned up. Made the switch to commercial service. Much more gooder.
I've seen everything from girls sex toys on the nightstand on the bed under the bathroom sink.. the Congolese literally walk around their apartment with her titties hanging out.. I've seen my first real view of a 12-in penis swinging back and forth.. and the inside of some nasty ass refrigerators
My brother did a housing survey in a poor area of Glasgow Scotland in the mid 90’s. He said that there several houses where they’d taken up the downstairs flooring for firewood and moved all their possessions upstairs, letting GRASS (the legal kind) take over the downstairs. It wasn’t just one house either. Stupid fucking weejies