Reddit can be a source of fascinating personal anecdotes. Who knew winning a lifetime supply of apples could be so alienating? But along with the personal anecdotes comes a darker side: the horrifying, in-the-trenches tales you never wanted to know, yet find yourself scrolling through anyway.
What hotel workers have uncovered fits into the latter category. (Of course it does. Spoiler alert: a lot of poop and sex toys. Sometimes combined.) After asking the question, “Hotel maids of reddit, what was the most disturbing thing you found while cleaning out a room?” Reddit user AJmcfly received a wealth of skin-crawling answers.
Ready to start? Okay, let’s dive right in with arlee77’s answer. While not an eyewitness to the situation, it’s scarring nonetheless:
hearing about ice cube trays perfectly filled with human shit being found in the minibar at the Hilton stopped me from ever using ice cube trays in hotels again
Greyhoundpaws wrote about a guest’s extra housecleaning request, which came with a tip that could never, ever come close to touching the actual price of what it would take to complete the request:
I had a summer job cleaning hotel rooms. One day a coworker told me she walked into her first room that day and the first thing she saw, neatly arranged on the desk, were 3 dildos, a note saying “please wash :)” and a 20 crown note (about $2). She didn’t.
_Belmount_ wrote about the courteous guest that didn’t want her family to have to clean up after her mess, and instead relied on housekeeping to take care of it:
I work at a hotel but not a maid myself. Though one day a maid found a woman who committed suicide. She checked in so her family would not be forced to find the body. It was the middle of the day and the hotel was mostly clear of people. Nobody heard the gun shot and we have concrete floors that stopped the bullet from traveling out of the room. The way it was described to me was it was relatively clean. She laided in bed and put a pillow on her head and shot through it towards the ground. It wasnt until the cops came that blood got everywhere. The maid soon quit afterwards.
allthecatsplease wrote about what may be every housekeeper’s worst nightmare:
Naked man in bath. I was 16, knocked and called loudly before I walked in. He sat there with a big creepy grin on his face and visible erection. Gross.
WaterWitchOfTheNorth told two housekeeping stories, one bizarre, the other entirely disgusting:
I worked as a house keeper in a small motel for maybe 2 months. One day we had to clean a room covered completely in paper towels. Everything was covered. The bed, the chairs, the floor. Not horrific, but weird. This next one is why I hated my job, and was happy to have gotten fired. We had to clean a room covered in shit. Human poo. On the bed, on the towels. Every where but the toilet. The towels were twisted, and covered like they had been shoved up someone’s rectum. And to top it all off, when I asked about being able to use gloves, I was told no. Just grab the shit covered stuff by the edges where they were shit free. Gah I hated that place.
NovelistResearcher’s brother’s anecdote isn’t horrifying as much as it is creepy and also a bit sad:
My brother is a janitor for Holiday Inn and was once called to fix something in a guest’s room while they were out. He opened the door and found what appeared to be three newborn children in the bed. Turns out the old couple liked Reborn dolls so much they took them on holiday and had added “breathing” mechanisms to them so the chests would rise and fall like a real baby…
Inserthumorousname’s story of cleaning up after construction workers is just baffling and something you probably won’t want to think about for too long:
I was a housekeeper on an island resort, and we had contractors living there during the week building a new high-rise. They would go home for the weekend and we had to clean their shit. They were getting free accommodation, and didn’t give a shit. They were always fucked. Week old plates of food, spilt bong water etc. But the most confusing moment was in the bottom of a fridge. There was a layer of sand a couple of cm thick, and rock hard. So I proceed to chip away at the sand biscuit and as I do so, i start to see small curly hairs appearing. Loads of them. To this day I still don’t know how so many pubes got into the sand, in the bottom of a mini fridge, and what acted as the binding agent.
Not sure I want to know, really…
R4tgrl is probably scarred for life every time she sees a popsicle (and now we all are, too) because of what she discovered when she accompanied her grandmother on a hotel-cleaning gig:
My grandma used to clean hotel rooms and I used to go with her because its a laid back job and nobody else could watch me. My grandma was cleaning and I was sitting on the counter playing my DS. I wanted to get a drink so checked to see if there was ice in the freezer. There was no ice, but there was a popsicle box! I got so excited. I ran into the bathroom and asked my grandmother if I could have a popsicle. Assuming they were in plastic wrap, she said yes. I ran back to the freezer and reached into the cardboard box and pulled out a long, purple dildo covered in shit. Human feces. I was 7.
It’s all been pretty bad so far, but GGoDDeSS’ tale truly takes the cake. It has everything — drugs, feces, vomit, used condoms, you name it. And all in one little hotel room:
…I open the door only to be greeted by a grotesque display of everything that is considered repulsive and dangerous to touch. There were… lets see if I remember this right… Used condoms filled with semen on the bed accompanied by stains which may or may not have been semen. There was blood all throughout the room. Too much blood for there to have not been a murder. Like… Jigsaw played a game in the room.
There were used needles, crack pipes, other random drug things… empty pill bottles, broken and unbroken liquor bottles, cigarette butts along with ashes and burn marks, plus tons of trash… Then the bathroom. There was piss everywhere. More blood. Vomit in the tub, in and around the toilet and… here’s the good part… ceiling. There was vomit on the ceiling. I noped out of the room and called the front desk and asked them to call the police. The cops came to investigate the blood and drug use in the room and probably the people who had rented it and checked out. I left for the day.
So the next day rolls around and I look at my sheet and see that same room. Confused, I go up to the third floor and I see the room in the same condition minus the drug stuff. Condoms, vomit, blood, bottles, cigarettes, trash, all still there.
I call the manager and tell them I’m not doing it. Its a job for a biohazard team. They tell me, “Just get what you can. Wipe everything you can off the surfaces. We’ll have a fabric cleaner come in for the rest.” Nope. I quit. I dealt with small amounts of bodily fluids on a daily basis and I was fine with it, but that was WAY too much to ask of a 17 year old kid on minimum wage.
Can you do any better? Let us know in the comments. Or maybe not — we’ve read all we need to about hotel rooms. Next time we’re on the road, we’re pitching our own poo-free tents and staying in our own clean sleeping bags.
(Via BroBible)
