1780 Poop Secret.

by

Having a restroom in your business will make you hate other people. Of course having a business at all will do that, but a restroom will speed the whole thing along. I had far too many fecal incidents in my retail days. Even when I was higher in the chain o’ command I often was the only employee willing to clean up after the shit monsters who abused the facilities. If my father had been the manager and someone had said they’d rather be fired than clean a restroom he would have obliged them, but that kind of management is not acceptable in the wider world.
Restrooms are one of those things that people, at least in America, see as right and not a privilege. Of course that’s true of a lot of things in retail. Restrooms are a kindness, a convenience, but entitled Americans seem to see them as something that can be used, abused, and never taken away, as well as being someone else’s problem. I have no idea what it’s like in other parts of the world, or even in the edge parts of America.
Of course I had to clean shit up from random places inside the store itself on more than one occasion, so it’s not like poop problems are limited to just restrooms…

88 Comments

And this is why I never take a dump anywhere when not at home. Pubic Bathrooms be nasty. Hardly ever used them even when I was in school.

You’re lucky you’ve never had to clean them.

Seriously, how hard is ‘point and aim’? Some guys just need to be forced to sit down to pee. Further more, women’s restrooms often have little trash bins on the stall wall for the hygiene products, so why the fuck do some women flush the damned things down the toilet?! And don’t even get me started on what some braindead assclots throw in the toilet. IT’S NOT A DAMNED TRASH CAN!!!

I’m not sure if it has more to do with me moving up the socio-economic scale as I get older, but this isn’t my experience…it seems to me that public restrooms are getting cleaner as I get older. Certainly, graffiti – something I NEVER understood – has gone down enormously since I was kid in the 70s.

If I was a boss, it would’ve been one of the first things I stated to the employee.

“Cleaning the bathroom is part of your job. Will you do that?”

Then, if they don’t, they can be fired. :p

Make it part of the interview. They have a problem with it, they don’t get hired and you have a lot less paperwork.

It technically falls under the “and anything else we tell you that is required for you to do when we tell you to do it” clause every large business has.

When I had my first non-seasonal job, I would usually confront the manager who’d ask me to clean up something gross with this: “Evaluate me or write me up. I’ve been here for two years and have never been written up or promoted, I can work any two stations at the same time and get paid the same legal minimum as lazy new hires.”

I worked at that McDonalds from the age of 16 until the age of 21. I never was evaluated or written up, so never got a raise, never got fired … but at least I never cleaned up biological waste.

While I feel like employees should do their job, including cleaning up shit, I also feel like EMPLOYERS need to do their fucking job. If they don’t, then the employees have every right to tell them to go fuck themselves. And if they don’t want to discipline you, that’s their own stupid problem.

Oddly enough its always the womens bathroom that gets complaints. The guys bathroom only gets fucked when some foreigners or handicap think the drain in the middle is where they shit.

I’m not lyin’: after hearing that story, I feel kind of better about my days doing retail work. Goodness, and all of that. Gosh.

At my current job, not retail, I recall a meeting in which they started complaining about someone crapping on the floor in the middle of the bathroom.

My first thought was “Seriously guys? You can’t grow up?”

Turns out it was the female bathroom.

All the bathroom horror stories I hear from people always seem to be more the female bathroom than the male bathroom and it just surprises me.

Allow me to break the trend. On more than one occasion I was charged with cleaning up after “customers” who were struck by their artistic muse in the restroom and use the only medium at hand: their own fecal matter and the walls of the toilet stall.
One, in what I can only assume was an avant-garde attempt at being meta, used his own shit to paint the word “SHIT” in three-foot-tall letters all over the restroom. Another less-inspired soul drew a giant dick.

This only ever happened in the men’s room. The sum total of bodily waste I cleansed from the lady’s room was a large puddle of vomit from someone who disappeared a 40-ounce of Bud Light into the restroom, chugged the entire thing, then got violently ill.
Speaking of which: Why do they always steal the freaking Budweisers? So many better beers on the shelf, and it isn’t like they were paying for them.

On the other hand, though, I know males that will walk right past five urinals filled to the brim with… stuff that urinals weren’t designed for… only to pee all over the one toilet that, before their arrival, was the only clean toilet in the restroom.

And no complaints are made until either a not-lazy employee or a manager sees it. Or every single stall in the building is unusable.

I have a theory as to why the women’s restroom is usually the site of “unpleasantness”
Children.
mothers will bring their children with them into the restroom more often than fathers.
and children are disgusting exploding poop goblins.

As a parent, I can confirm that children are fountains of feces. And since women are more likely to be the stay at home parent, they poop in (or on) the ladies room. But remember, if you don’t help clean up or at least warn the staff that your cute little poop bomb has exploded, then everyone will think you are a shitty parent. pun intended.

Females also tend to use more TP, and not because many use it regularly even when they urinate, but because most public toilets don’t have anything to put on the seat, which is disgusting, and so they always cover it up with TP, which leads to clogs. If they don’t use TP on the toilet, they often time squat over it. I don’t know if anyone here has ever had the pleasure of seeing a female urinate, but it’s not very controlled. I also don’t know if anyone here tired to ever poop while squatting over a toiler either, but that’s not very controlled either all the time, especially if you have very soft stool (though that is a problem that plagues both sexes hence some mess in the man’s room too) Another thing that leads to clogs are tampons, pads, and heavy duty period wipes (and the wrappers).

… and those who, in order not to come into contact with the nasty toilet seat, choose to “hover” over the seat. Said hovering often leads to bad aim and even nastier seats

What we need is to hook up a pull chain in each stall that, when pulled will immediately shower the entire stall in a high pressure stream of a mixture of detergent and strong antiseptic (preferably one that activates proactively if a patron misses the target while still in the stall – thus motivating them to be on-target).

Okay enough of my weird ideas. I just hope those who’ve had the horror of cleaning up after the monsters that stalk the public restrooms had a good smile at the image of a nasty patron being hosed down along with their own filth to leave the stalls sparking instead of gross

In Japan they actually have toilets that clean after themselves and properly apply a protective covering, which then gets disposed of afterwards. Kind of like our automatic flushers. They also have heated seats. With that said though, it only works if no one purposefully shits on the seat. Generally speaking MOST Japanese people have more respect than that. Younger tourists however…

Working maintenance at Walmart confirms this. The women’s restrooms were always worse. And usually had more retail packaging from shoplifted items stuffed in odd places.

Its not retail either.

Currently a Fed Contractor. Walked into a Restroom in my building planning to desecrate the throne. In the middle of the floor a splat Pile of shit in the middle of the floor and some smeared on the stall doors and nose goblins on the mirror. Had to walk around the building for 20 minutes to find a bathroom that WASN’T a complete and utter Horror show.

Worked White Collar IT support for a Bank with 2 TRILLION In assets Name rhymes with BittySminancial. MULTIPLE times walked into the mens bathroom to take a leak and somehow there is Piss on the floor not just dribbles or “back splash” But 3 feet away and in the opposite direction of the urinal a full on puddle with FOOT PRINTS. Further more ONCE on a WEEKEND doing work on the 3rd floor in their Baltimore office. Someone Managed to climb up on the SHELF in the mens room and managed to leave a PILE on the shelf. I said screw it went up to the executive suites. Those are usually sort of clean let the security guards know what was up. Pile of shit was still there monday morning when i came back. Another time Someone managed to SHIT in one of the Urinals at The same job site. Im not even sure how the physics of that worked.

White Collar folks can be just as nasty.

Here’s the fun thing. The idea of charging to use restrooms was thought of as an irritating tax and just money-grubbing, when in fact the concept was to ensure that the facilities could be adequately cleaned and maintained.

I still have to admit to respect for people who hold onto the restroom keys and insist that the restrooms are for paying customers only. And I’m not talking about this as a con methodology as seen when the Comic Book Shop guy in the Simpsons fleeced Millhouse into buying something.

I’m talking places like fuel stations or retail dealers where the restrooms are not taken for granted. Heck, most individual stores in Australia only have restrooms for customers overseen by the building site managers who contract professional cleaning services once per day, or otherwise as Speerhausen has said, have people who are paid to do the job.

Charging people to use the bathroom for the sake of proper cleaning and maintenance still doesn’t cut it as an argument though. People by nature have to pee and poop. It’s just the way we are and if we don’t have spare change to use the bathroom, you’re pretty much saying that we have to shit or pee our pants. The only other resolution is to have people wear diapers again.

I was once working at a large Canadian retail chain (Zellers – like walmart but not as… ick), and one day had to clean up after someone who had and accident in the furthest reaches of the back of the store. Not only was the initial mess quite large, but they left a literal trail NOT to the washrooms (which were about 10 feet away from the initial mess), but ALL the way through the store and out the front doors.

I agree with Jo’s sentiment

Been a store-worker, + had to clean cr*p in the store’s spaces, spaces not intended for cr*p.
I feel for ya, Jackie!
Been there, done that. Retail work can be its own special brand of horror. Ugh.

I ask myself this question whenever I use the toilet at my movie theater
and it’s not only because it’s disgusting, the state of the stalls feels like there’s been a hurricane in there

seriously, fuck these people

Yes, the women’s restroom is always worse than the men’s restroom where I work. Sure with the men’s room you might have to put a bit more elbow grease into scrubbing the bowl itself. With the women’s room on the other hand…. it still boggles the mind how someone can spray poop 5 ft up the wall behind the toilet (I am not kidding one bit).

Because girls don’t fart in public – they are so full of gas that opening the doors lets loose a hurricane.

May also explain why so many have potty mouth.

legit.. why I claim biohazard and refuse to clean the toilets.. you can, and people have, acquired STDs and other things from public toilet usage and cleaning…

sooo i tell them… hazard pay, and PPE or tell someone else to do it..

not nice of me, but i’ll be selfish in that case.

Makes me wonder what OSHA has to say about that sort of thing.

Nada would be my guess at least not in favor of the employee who has to clean it. OSHA standards require an employer have an accessible and sanitary restroom for employees. Soooo yeah, sounds like they’d favor the other employees over the poor slub who got stuck with bathroom duty.

A bit of addendum and clarification, what i said with exceptions to designated and trained janitorial staff of course (really wish there were an edit function for the comments).

I used to work for Clarks (a shoe store) and we don’t have a restroom at all, except for employees, and it was down a set of stairs into an old Roman basement.
Anyway, the amount of entitled customers who would literally huff and puff at the lack of facilities was a bit lower than you’d think. The biggest bunch of entitled people were, surprisingly, those of an age where you’d expect them to be able to hold it.
We did let those with kids use it, but when they saw the descent down, they often said no.

Legally, in much of America, it has been made into a right. You often have no choice but to offer a restroom. Even when my dad opened a little, teeny, tiny shop that was maybe 200 square feet where most customers were in and out in 5 minutes, he had to install a bathroom.

I’m a ten year veteran of food service. I know her pain well…

I will never understand how some people can be so disgusting. You would not anyone doing that at your home, so why do it to someone else?

That’s the thing it’s not a home, yours is a place of work where we wage slaves are being paid to look after the self entitled who can never be wrong.

Plus when you consider some of these individuals, its all too likely they DO do that crap at home.

I mean the typical mess makers I see in the bar business makes me realize that you cannot expect rational behaviour from these individuals cause once they are through your doors a neanderthal has better common sense.

‘Hey I’m drunker than a skunk I think I’ll see how good my aim is…. WHEEEEEE’

I was trained in the era where there were lines that could be crossed… Like if a customer started swearing we could, politely, ask them to take a moment to calm down. Then I went to overnights and got lucky, as the last place I worked at locked the doors after a certain time. If anything, I got more frustration from trying to tell my boss about how customers acted on nights. I have never seen so much denial from one person… It was like she refused to believe it, even when we showed her camera footage from multiple nights.

I have been a janitor at several jobs now. I can totally relate to Jo. People treat workplaces bathroom worse than a two year with anything in their hands. Worst I ever found was someone had legit wrote HI on the walls in shit. The letters were bout a foot and a half tall and been smeared on by hand. I honestly don’t know how they got away with this and were never seen. We didn’t have any way of finding out who the culprit was, but all I remember was the smell and shock of that site.

Yeah….. yet another reason for me to not work retail again or use public toilets if possible.

I also have the reason of rheumatoid arthritis where my immune system is a total fucking bastard and attacking my joints, thus not doing it’s real job of protecting me from what is legitimately a biohazard. Faeces once evacuated from the producing body are a biohazard which is why hospitals have to dispose of stool, urine, and blood samples in a VERY specific way or get shut down.

Therefore you can’t really make me clean the toilets and you can fire me for it but then I’d just pull Equality Act 2010 on you and make your career go to shit even if you avoid prison for it. So yeah you’re kinda fucked in that regard.

It’s a human right to not die from your bladder bursting. It’s a right to not sit in your own filth.

We made relieving yourself in public illegal forcing people to find restrooms or go to jail. So yes those public restrooms are a right not a privilege. I have had to clean restrooms at multiple jobs I had. Sometimes they were trashed most times they were fine. Sometimes there was an apple in the toilet, yes seriously.

We like to paint them as a privilege apparently for some reason when it’s a biological imperative. One that will not be ignored.

I feel your pain, Jo, but let me just give a shout-out: The local shop of a big-name candy company based in my city did extra business by me this weekend because I did not have to rush my purchases to run somewhere else for a restroom break, as I have in the past. If my town’s equivalent of the store in this comic would also decide to open their restroom to the paying customer, it would mean a great deal more business, from me at least. I would gladly drop a few bucks on a Magic: the Gathering booster to take a break while my wife looks through every. single. movie.

the worst i ever encountered, back when i worked for mcdonalds.
one of the managers offered me a choice. if i cleaned the restroom, they would let me go home early, and I would still get paid for the the 3 hours i had left on my shift. (i hated this job, so i jumped at the chance, before checking the restroom)

……..near as I could tell, someone’s ass had exploded in the women’s restroom.
it was all over the toilet, floor, walls going up at least 4 feet, and i think there may have even been some on the ceiling. it was pretty much everywhere BUT the toilet bowl.

For my post-college professional life, I have worked at places where people show up in suits and require ID badges in order to be on the premises, and I still can’t believe the state of the bathrooms. You have to have a pretty good degree to get a job at this place, and yet people still can’t aim or flush properly.

Here is some history to put this all in perspective. Prior to 1972 there were no unified guidelines or rules as to the providing, count, access, or actual make-up of toilets in the USA. Before this it was a patchwork of stipulations, state by state or specific to larger cities. The reason for this was that toilet laws really had more to do with providing facilities for the workers and not the general public.

There were many places where the workers had no toilets. They were expensive to provide and maintain, implied that workers would actually stop and leave their posts, they had to be cleaned and used resources, etc. There was resistance to have them at all.

However, as jobs in the 70’s started to move out to other countries, as service jobs increased, as the number of women in the job place grew, and the very nature of retail changed the combined pressures to create more appealing working environments also increased. It turned out that one of the cheaper perks was to have better restrooms.

So, in the USA, the ubiquity of toilets in the workplace is a direct result of making the workplace better for workers. It was not the general public, but the workers (especially women), labor unions, health agencies, social watch groups, etc.

That is why when things started to get codified and worked into building codes that they felt more like meeting social standards or expectations vs. real-world needs. This feeling only accelerated as legislation such as the American Disabilities Act (ADA) became law and its modifications took hold.

What we are left with is a public landscape that is much more convenient, provides a consistency of service, and ensures a much wider participation in the workplace than in times past. However, as others have noted, it feels like it is built on a foundation of forced privileged to the public even though its origins were to benefit the worker.

Yes, they are toilets and yes, they can get amazingly messed up. But at least you have one in your business. Imagine if you did not.

P.S. On a side note – contrary to the assumption that women are more prim and proper, it has been repeatedly shown that women’s toilets are consistently more in need of cleaning, repair, and are subject to more petty vandalism. The men’s room only is worse in major vandalism (like removing sinks). It costs more to have women’s restrooms due to this and the codes that drive the type and count of fixtures. It is still odd that women trash their toilets more than men.

There’s at least one person at my workplace who doesn’t wash their hands.
Then there’s the guy who fills a bottle of water to splash his arse with (I think it’s a religious thing), and in so doing regularly coats the entire toilet seat with water.

But those are but minor concerns next to the horror that is the Phantom of the Plopra; the Phantom must not shit for days at a time, for the devastation they unleash upon the toilet is the stuff of legend.

I’m talking a shit so thick, large and dense it sinks and doesn’t move at all, drapes itself down the pipe out of sight and can’t be flushed without someone using a stick to break it up first.

Phantom of the Plopra
*snerk*
I’m going to have to appropriate that one to describe some of the horrors I’ve seen that could not be tied back to the perpetrator.

worked at a fun center/ tour business for a couple years. Literal poop flower drawings in the bathroom one time.
Lots of Asians, Indians(dots) and middle eastern folks come through, so they never want to sit, they stand and squat on the seat, and of course miss.

Agreed bathrooms are the worst.

People in the US are terrified of toilets, so far as I’m aware. They “hover”, they piss everywhere, they’re just fucking weird.

I didn’t see nearly so much of that in France or Japan. Bonus points for Japan for putting video games in the toilets so you have to get it all in the fucking toilet to get a high score (and discounts for the people who were drinking), and for France for putting a little sticker that looks like a bug in the urinal to encourage people to aim.

Ironically you mention two of the industrialized countries notorious for inadequate or limited toilet facilities. It has only been a relatively recent push due to decades of negative press and tourists that there has been significant change. Even now, large areas of both countries still have severely limited access to sanitary and modern toilets (they are just not in the tourist or popular areas).

I lived in France a year and traveled extensively through Europe in the late 1980s and France was one of the worst in terms of toilets. Italy and Greece were also low on the list.
My mother traveled through Japan about the same time, for about 3 months, and found toilets to be clean but very limited in count and several were squat toilets and nearly all lacked items like paper towels, toilet paper, or hand dryers (yes, there are reasons for that on an island nation… however England had it figured out)

Work in a Health Sci library at a big U, and our women’s restrooms are a regular goddamn nightmare. The campus and the town at large have a big homeless problem (what town doesn’t?) Campus homeless leave their waste in the shrubbery next to the walkways, and downtown retailers generally don’t offer restrooms, so waste shows up in middle of sidewalks. Being able to distinguish the distinct odor of human waste from other droppings shouldn’t be a skill you pickup living in a US city.

My first job, the restroom (There was only one. A unisex single-seater.) was supposed to be cleaned twice a day. I seemed to be the only one who ever actually cleaned it, just about every one else just checked “clean the restroom” off of the duty list and left it. I once had three days off in a row and when I went to clean the restroom my first shift back, it was pretty clear no one had cleaned it while I’d been out. Still, I don’t have any real horror stories of cleaning the toilets at that job.

No… The horror story comes from my second job. It was a fairly slow day, not a lot of customers coming in, so obviously not a lot of people using the restroom. Not long before I went to clean the restrooms, the only people who I saw use them tat day came in. It was a coworker who was not working on the time and his son; he always worked closing but I can’t remember if he was scheduled that day or not. When they were done, they said a friendly goodbye to us and left.

Anyway, I started with the ladies, because I always start with the ladies. It was fine. Barely any mess at all. Then I opened the door to the men’s… The first thing I saw was the clogged toilet, filled to the brim with shit, toilet paper, and paper towels, shit stains running down the outside of the bowl. Then I noticed the flooded floor; piles of wet toilet paper and paper towels strewn about in shit filled water… Then I noticed something dripping. I looked up and saw a soaked ceiling with wet toilet paper clinging to it.

I backed out of the room and shut the door. Then I went to my supervisor, the only other person who was working with my that shift, and told her to go look in the men’s room. She did and had much the same reaction I did. “I’m not cleaning that,” I said, “I can’t… I…” (or something to that effect.) She said she didn’t blame me and that she wasn’t cleaning it either, so we just put an out of order sign on the door and never spoke of it again.

Allow me to reiterate… That mess was not made by a customer. That mess was made by a coworker. Someone who knew us. Someone who left with a smile on his face and gave no warning of what awaited us after making that mess. Someone who was supposed to have cleaned that bathroom at some point. Though I honestly doubt he ever did clean it.

As someone who used to work as a high school custodian, Brooksie speaks for me. This is an immortal question that is from the first days people pooped somewhere other than their homes.

Simple answer to her question: Customers are not human.

That is implied by the phrasing of the question, actually. She doesn’t ask why customers can’t poop like normal humans, just why they can’t poop like humans. While clearly subhuman filth, they also share a similar anatomy. And yet they manage to shit on the ceiling somehow.

I don’t understand the legal issues involved, but I’m pretty sure buildings of a certain size and rated occupancy are required to have certain numbers of restrooms available to visitors. More interesting, there are liability issues with letting employees clean up “biohazards”. At one job I simply wasn’t allowed to clean up such messes. Someone with proper training and proper equipment was supposed to do it.

And there is a reason hardware stores display the toilets they have for sale on the wall, and not on the floor anymore.

Yeah – quite a few stories of parents whisking their kids out of a hardware store after finding junior dropping a deuce in one of the display fixtures when not attended. The parents generally hightail it out without telling anyone because they are to mortified to tell the store staff what their kid did.

Public restroom horror stories is why I think they should be designed as chambers that can be sealed up and steam cleaned with a press of of a switch. Most modern building codes require a sprinkler system and floor drain anyways, so may as well make use of them outside the mandate.

They actually make self-cleaning bathrooms. I’ve seen one demonstrated in Japan. Keep in mind they don’t provide any TP in it (they expect you to bring your own in with you) so the spray-clean isn’t going to soak down the TP.

Part of it is perspective. The vast majority of customers and coworkers don’t make a mess. But those who do, you remember. Though I remain mildly shocked at the drunken antics a customer can think are a good idea at the time. Even by those not actually drunk.

And this is why i’m glad i work warehouse (and even that gets iffy with customers picking up orders). minimal damage to the john and the room housing it when everybody knows each other.

I caused this once at a Ralphs… I had bad food poisoning and thankfully it was only puke that ended up outside the bowl (I think… I hope…), but god that was a lot of puke. I immediately explained and apologized to the first employee I could find. Of course, I was ill so I don’t know if I ACTUALLY did explain/apologize or if I just thought I did while actually doing something else.
I wish I could have apologized personally to the poor soul that was forced to clean up after me.

I once developed a very queasy tummy while doing a social event on the 40th floor of a hotel in NYC. Queasy tummy and an elevator ride down don’t mix too well. I managed to make it outside the elevator on the 3rd floor (and let the doors shut on the remaining occupants before I could no longer hold it. I decided I would just keep it all in one area rather than leave a trail – to minimize the damage. Immediately after I was stable enough to move on, I went to the hotel office and let them know about the problem – apologizing profusely for something I wished I could have avoided. It seemed the the only decent thing to do.

It would be nice if patrons of other establishments who have nasty accidents could at least warn the staff and apologize. It doesn’t make the mess any less foul, but it does make it a tiny bit more tolerable when you get tasked with cleaning up the aftermath when you know the person was truly sorry for it plus prompt notification means it probably gets dealt with quicker before it becomes even more putrid – or dries on and has to be scrubbed off with steel wool…

Yeah – I’ve had the job to clean the loo at a fast food joint where I worked. It was always my job when I worked there and closed up at night.

I have noticed in only a few establishments [so far] the used of water proof cladding, institutional commodes [stainless and almost bullet proof] floor drains with sluices, no open fixtures, outlets, lamps, anything. Now here is the kicker, there was a fire hose cabinet that showed some wear and tear. I asked on the QTH and they admitted that they literally hosed down the rooms and blasted fresh outside air through to quicken the drying. Lets just say the facilities tended to be a bit nippy in the winter XD

When I worked in retail, my boss was nearly always the one to clean the restrooms. Sometimes it was his second in commend, when he wasn’t around for a while (usually covering another store) who he brought with him from his old store when they moved him. However the primary reason was that he never asked anyone, because I’m pretty sure any of the employees who lasted more than a month would have done it. However we also didn’t have public restrooms, if someone wanted to use the bathroom we had to unlock a door and take them to it, then bring them out. That way most people didn’t think to ask, and we got to be slightly picky.

It’s really about respect and personal consideration.

I worked at a popular pizza place for 3 years in high school in the summer. It was my second job, but it was my favorite job. The first year, we had maybe two real bathroom horror stories, and that was because the customers who created said mess were already inconsiderate. However, most of the time, everyone was nice and the restroom was clean. Everyone loved eating there, too, and always had nice things to say about the food and the service.

My last year there, the quality of food had gone downhill, and since management squeezed every penny out of the place, they stopped hiring decent people to work there. We started having more complaints than praise. So the bathroom incidents went up drastically. Crap all over the stalls, pee on the floor, clogged toilets/urinals, broken mirrors, broken sinks, graffiti, paper towels EVERYWHERE …

Which has always been an indication of how people feel about a store and it’s service. If I go in the bathroom and its trashed, there’s probably a huge problem with the store’s image and the people who work there (although not all employees may be the problem, it may be management who makes the people who work there not care).

I worked ten years as a custodian in a high school on second shift. There isn’t enough space to tell the stories of things I’ve found or had to clean up in the bathrooms. While in my experience it was mostly the male bathrooms/locker rooms that were destroyed more often, there were nights the females won the most disgusting clean up trophy.

The school district I worked for has an alternative school in a separate building for troubled kids, grade wise or behavior issues. Their building was being renovated so they were housed in the high school for a couple months. The last day they were in the high school they decided to leave us a present. You got into the doorway of the bathroom and the smell alone told you it wasn’t going to be a good night. Sure enough they had smeared crap all over any surface they could, urinals, sinks, mirrors, walls, stall doors and walls, and even got it to stick to the ceiling. Then they made us a tower or poop and toilet paper that stuck up a good 3-4 inches above the rim of the toilet. I’ll admit to this being the only time I abused my position of night supervisor and passed bathroom duties off onto another worker. Poor guy spent half the night just cleaning that one lone bathroom.

The worst part of female bathrooms is feminine hygiene products. Make up and lipstick on the walls/mirrors/sinks can suck but usually was an easy clean up. It was walking into a stall to find used pads stuck underneath the toilet bowl or to the wall or tampons tossed into a corner of the stall that was disgusting. The other weird thing was how often we found underwear and bras left in the bathrooms.

And while we expected nasty/disgusting things from the kids, the teacher/staff only bathrooms sometimes were just as bad. Our favorite story we tell people is of the day one of the staff only bathrooms was having issues flushing. The toilet was torn apart, there were tools all over the bathroom floor, an out of order sign on the locked door and yet a staff member still went in and did their business.

Once, a long time ago, somewhere in the 16 hours between my 26 hour shift, and my 18 hour shift,
A very obese customer shat all over the toilet, stall, and even under the seat…
They sent one of the ignoramuses to “clean” it.

Needless to say,
I spent 2 hours of my 18 hour shift with a power washer actually making it clean.

I ashamedly admit to being one of those little arseholes in Primary School (Australia, mate, what is that, Elementary School in USA?) who wanted to see just how much wet wadded up paper towels could be made to stick to a ceiling before they started to fall down.

I’m sure there’s a janitor somewhere who would cheerfully smack me in the face if they knew.

That said I’ve never done anything worse in a public bathroom and fortunately have never been called upon in my retail job to clean up anything worse than when a toddler’s nappy overflowed with pee in one of the aisles.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.