Shoutout to the guy at the hardware store who asked 'what's the worst thing you've ever had to clean'

I was picking up a new surface cleaner attachment in Tacoma last week, and this older guy in line just turned and asked me that. I laughed and said a three-story house siding that had moss so thick it looked like green fur. He nodded and said, 'Try a 30-year-old grease trap at a shut-down diner. That smell stays with you.' We got talking, and he told me he used to run a small cleaning crew in the 90s. The point he made, which stuck with me, is that the worst jobs are never about the dirt you see. They're about the STORY behind the mess. That diner grease trap? The owner died and the place sat for months. It wasn't just grease, it was sadness and rot. It changed how I look at my own jobs now. I'm not just blasting dirt off a driveway, I'm fixing a piece of someone's life that got out of hand. Has anyone else had a job where the story of the mess hit you harder than the work itself?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninasanchez1mo ago

That "sadness and rot" line got me. Did he ever say what finally got the smell out, or did it just fade?

paigec141mo ago

My uncle did crime scene cleanup for a while. He said the worst part was never the mess itself, it was the quiet in those houses after.