How clean is everyone elses house?
My house? Well, I live with my parents still... but I have two rooms - my bedroom complete with ensuite & another room for my PC, basses, amps, whatever. I've spent ages last night cleaning, and still have more to do.... My carpet is made entirely of clothes, I have empty wrappers everywhere, enough dust for a mong to write their name in, had up to 20+ glasses before, various plates with pizza remenants on, the works... At one point I could barely see my desk for rubbish.

But what do I do for a living?

Cleaning.

So my excuse is I don't take my work home with me... After spending all day cleaning & tidying everyone elses houses, I don't really fancy doing more when I get home.

So call me a hypocrite :) But in the past 6 years or so I've been cleaning for, I've seen the following...

1) Shit stained y-fronts in an office block: I worked for two years cleaning an office over the road. Occasionally I'd get stuck with doing the toilets, and that included a disabled toilet that had a shower cubicle in it. I was greeted one evening by some manky y-fronts, complete with brown stain. Lovely... I just left it there, no way was I touching that.

After leaving that job, I started working for our family cleaning company cleaning houses. Yay.

2) The Chinese: Still quite possibly the worst places I've ever had to clean. There's a chinese company with an office 2 minutes away from us, and they rent a load of flats in town near the train station for employees they bring over from China to stay in.

It started off not toooo bad... There wouldn't normally be people there, so we could get on & do everything, listen to the radio, have a laugh. The first couple of flats hadn't been cleaned very well for a while, but nothing we couldn't handle. There'd be a two/three bed flat, with only two rooms being used.

Then we got onto the three beds, with a matress in the living room as there was so many of them living in these tiny places... The shower doors were sheet white from limescale, toilets had brown limescale all down them, the cooker was just one big black burnt on grubby mess, carpets had burn marks on them on top of various stains, kids had drawn on the walls... Absolutley filthy. Not far from needing Kim & Saggy to go round there. It'd take 3 - 4 of us about 6 hours to do.

Oh, and Coca-Cola doesn't work on cleaning toilets. Yup, the usual bleach & harpic wasn't working at getting the bogs up, so I gave it a go.

3) Cleaning up before the cleaners arrive: I don't know why, but people do it. They pay for us to come in and clean, but when we get there, they've left the hoover out from the night before. And a fair few do this too, I really don't get it.

We clean for our family doctor, who had their house built for them. They've got an Aga cooker, which is encased in a brick surrounding. I brushed along the inside of the brickwork with a long duster, and it left a load of crap on top of the aga. I carried on, as I was cleaning the kitchen later. My sister & I were there all day cleaning, so we nipped for some lunch - when I came back, all the crap ontop of the aga had gone. My doctor saw it, thought she'd made the mess and cleaned it up. Madness...

4) Don't touch anything...: We had one customer who cancelled us for a while, as they weren't going to be at home much. When they called us back, I went with my sis to talk to her about what she wanted doing. She didn't want us touching the towels in her bathroom, as it freaks her out, the thought of someone else touching them, even though she knows our hands are probably cleaner than hers. She doesn't want us moving things around or organising things - she likes the house to be lived in, not a show house. Fair enough... She said she didn't mind about the office being cleaned, only if we get time... Didn't mind about the 2nd living room being cleaned, and in the main living room to leave the piano, leaving just a table & mantlepiece. What did she want us to do then?!?!

5) Eaten something dodgy?: Went to one house, the guy was in. I went up to clean the bathroom, and my sister was on the landing talking to him. I lifted the toilet seat up, and was greeted by a brown mess - he'd clearly had the shits, and forgotten to flush. As my sister was standing outside the door, I had no choice but to flush it, open the window, then try and find something else to do for 5 minutes while the smell went. The worrying thing is, I don't remember there being any toilet paper down there with it....

6) The only time I've said no: I don't mind messy houses, dirt, whatever. It's better than trying to clean a clean house, you feel like you've done something when you walk out the door. But there was one house: Mould all up the bathroom tiles, cobwebs going from the kitchen sink to the cupboards, thick dust that you could probably have lost something in, loads of stuff everywhere, and it absolutley stank of damp or something. The only time I've said I'm not cleaning. How anyone could live like that... I don't know.

7) The toy: One customer wanted us to move their bed out & hoover underneath/behind it. Fine. One visit, I grabbed the bed at the bottom, but instead of getting hold of the frame, I grabbed the drawer, and was greeted by one fucking gigantic plastic rabbit.

There's probably loads I could write about people & their houses, but I think that's getting a bit long already...
(smazio, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 14:26, 1 reply)

Chefs are the same
I once lived with a chef and he lived on ready meals and instant mash.
(mmm....beer, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 17:32, closed)