I moved into a council house in the mid 1990's
The house was fine but the garden, the previous tenants we were informed had owned a lage alsation and kept it in the back garden 24/7, suffeice to say there was no lawn left to speak of as it had been chewed up by the dogs paws and the constant northwest rain.
SO I decided to dig over the back lawn and start fresh. Digging over to the depth of 4 inches I found the old window frames-those council single glazed ones that as children in the 1990's me and my mates used to attach wires from our boom boxes too in the mistaken belife they improved radio reception. Excpet there were about 3 houses worth all buerid in our garden.
Couple of years later, I had to dig over the front garden. And was expecting to unearth window frames. But instead discoved a toilet cistern.

How much effort is involved in burying windowframes and cisterns as opposed to throwing them on a council pickup and taking them down the muncipal tip?
(Gru being trolled since 1998, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 13:06, 5 replies)

Certain models of Samsung fridge/freezers
have developed an electrical fault so they need to send someone out to fix the problem. On Tuesday, a lady from a Comet call-centre with the hottest sexiest 'posh' voice I have ever heard (think Lara Croft from the second game onwards (yes it was a different voice artist)) phoned up to make an appointment for Friday (this) morning. I took down a ref. number then hung up, went upstairs and relieved a bit of tension, inspired by what I imagine she looked like in a skimpy vest and pants.

I then clean forgot about it.

At 11am this morning, the engineer called. "I'll be there before noon"

Aarrghhh!!!

I have never tidied the hallway so quickly, nor cleaned the fridge out completely (it was quite grotty in the door-shelf things) in less than 10 mins. It's now sparkling.

He turned up, pulled the appliance out, took a panel off the back and replaced some fuses. He didn't even look in the fridge or the freezer the inconsiderate get.

Still, it'll win enough points with the missus to encourage her to 'do the decent* thing' tonight.


*ninja edit thanks to Falstaff's Spiritual Successor
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 12:29, 3 replies)

Tube mountain!
About 10 years ago I rented a 2 bedroom house in Milton Keynes. The house can have only been 10 years old at most and the bathroom had been quite nicely done, this was about the nicest decorating in the whole house.

One day while sat on the bog curiousity got the better of me and I opened the airing cupboard door which was next to the throne.

I spied something I hadn't before at the bottom of the cupboard (the door didn't go all the way to the floor), it was a pile of white things. I picked up one and looked at it. It was a small white cardboard tube. I'd not seen anything like it before so thought nothing of it but there were literally HUNDREDS of them in there. A mini mountain of them around the bottom of the hot water tank.

About 6 months later I got my first "live in" girlfriend and duly discovered what those little white tubes were. That's right, they're the packaging/insertion tube from a tampon.

Now what still blows my mind today is how on earth in a 2 bed house no more than 10 years old does a previous occupant get through about 500 tampons??? The house was a rental so it seems unlikely someone had been putting them in there every month for 10 years!

Needless to say I left them there for a future treasure hunter to find!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 12:18, 4 replies)

My flat is tidy, but it is most definitely not clean
I’m highly ashamed to say that in the 4 and a half years I’ve lived there, I’ve only mopped the kitchen floor once. There is enough scum down the sides of the cooker and the washing machine and the fridge to feed a small country. They wouldn’t like it, but it would feed them nonetheless. The scum has never been cleaned. There is mouldy stuff on the walls, and I have spiders and silverfish fighting it out to see which can be King of Infestations. To be slightly fair to me, it is only tiny flat, so I don’t really have the opportunity to make so much of an obvious mess; it has all sneakily accumulated over the years. As dirt does, I guess. And it’s my first place. I figured that as I’m living alone in my first place and I’m not going to be here forever, I’m going to live how I like! Yeah! The next place I move to will probably be where I settle down, so I’ll be a domestic goddess then! Yeah! And, also, I just can’t be arsed to clean. It’s only me that sees it, and I don’t care. Although I did get hideously red faced about it all the other day and got all geared up to do a massive top to bottom clean. I was going to move things and clean behind them and the whole flat was going to be all fresh and shiny. Then I remembered I have no cleaning products. None. I’ve got Febreeze, but nothing to clean with. Gross.

Don’t get me wrong, I do clean. Most of the time. I do the basic stuff, like vacuuming, washing, tidying, washing up...er, that’s about it, actually. I make the bed every now and then. And spray the Febreeze if the rats are getting a bit stinky. Pet rats, silly, I’ve not got an infestation of wild rats scurrying about, feasting on spiders and silverfish and kitchen scum. Yet.

Right now, I’m blaming my lack of enthusiasm for cleaning on the spiders. I hate them and they’re everywhere. EVERYWHERE!!! They’re behind the shelves, under the bed, in the coat cupboard, in the kitchen cupboards, behind the curtains, in the little room by the bathroom, in the bathroom (which I don’t mind so much as they eat the silverfish, which also reside in the bathroom) and I’m pretty sure they’re in my wardrobe too. And everywhere they go, they spout web. It’s all over the place. And before you ask, it is definitely many different spiders, not one spider on a massive adventure. Every now and then I’ll get homicidal and hoover them up, but then I get nightmares about them crawling out of the vacuum cleaner to reap revenge. Urgh….I can feel them now…all over me….

Dammit, now I’ve written it all down, I can’t ignore how gross and wrong it all is. There’s no two ways about it. I’ve got to clean. Properly. Like an Adult™. Damn you b3ta, damn you.
(Beacon, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 12:08, Reply)

Mike the Shit
Derby & Rathbone Halls, Liverpool, 1999

Best years of your life etc... We had a communal kitchen on each floor; about 40 students to a kitchen with one tiny fridge. Being frugal, most opted to keep at least a little food in the fridge. Food, marked or unmarked, was snaffled up on a nightly basis by drunkards. Most saw it as collateral damage and accepted it, for others however, tensions ran high.

Some opted for diplomacy and left polite post-its on the door; one man chose direct action. He could have been the target of repeated thefts, but I suspect this was the first time he was a victim...
On returning to the kitchen from a night out, a group of revellers/raiders opened the fridge to find a single, very large (somewhere between a Stella can and a packet of Pringles), khaki-brown shit on neatly folded kitchen paper, with a note that simply read:

"eat this, not my ham"

(Mike's ham had been stolen the night before; Mike did a poo, and placed it in the fridge, it wasn't hard to join the dots. From that day forth he was known as Mike the Shit)
(M0nkeyb0Y ... you said "Simples"... like in the advert!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:42, 3 replies)

Experiments...
Over the years, I've lived with some pretty grotty people - ranging from the pillock in halls who got drunk and shat in the showers, to the Mexican in Golders Green who decided to keep a kilo of weird cheese in a carrier bag in the cupboard under the stairs. There was the student house in Bounds Green where one flatmate gradually went mad and refused to do any cleaning - she bought plug-in cooking utensils (rice cooker, toaster etc) and did all her cooking in her room, and then left early at the end of the year leaving us to clean everything. There was the strange Scot in Camberwell who lived entirely off boiled chicken legs, who smelt faintly of windowlene and despair.

The tale that springs to mind, however, regards your humble servant: moi. As a young child, I was possessed of an enquiring mind, and I used to carry out experiments; my parents were pretty ok about this - my mother let me fill up hummus pots with bread and grow mould*, and keep them in the cellar.

As academics, they positively encouraged my inquisitiveness... to the point where I graduated from mould...to MEAT!
One day a bird had got into the thatch and then fallen into the loo and drowned, so I buried it. A week later, I dug it up again, then re-buried it. A week later, I exhumed it once more - so on and so forth for 3 months, until it was completely decomposed.
Obviously, I was very interested (morbidly so) in the decomposition process, and wondered how it might work if a dead animal were not in the ground; fortunately, the cats caught a woodpigeon and left it on the doormat, so I put it in a baking tray and put it in the cellar with the mouldpots.

Then, fickle as a child's mind is, I forgot about it (I was probably distracted by the rumour that the caves in the nearby quarry were caused by giant dinosaur turds which then dissolved leaving the space around it - officially the coolest thing EVER to my friends and I).

I only remembered about it a few months later, when my mother went into the cellar for something, and screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
And then ran upstairs and screamed some more - mostly at me.

The cellar had to be fumigated, and I had to do my experiments at the bottom of the garden after that.



* Results:
Bread + milk = green.
Bread + water = black.
Bread + orange juice = oooh pretty colours!
Bread + some good-quality single malt from my parents' alcohol cupboard = a sound thrashing.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:41, Reply)

Goat Roomba
Growing up, I knew a family who were extraordinarily foul. Mad and alcoholic in equal measure, ‘cleaning’ meant burning parts of their house down. In the two decades I knew them, they never once cleaned their house. The last time I was there, the accumulation of bin bags outside their back door blocked out all natural sunlight.

At one point, they gained two pet goats. They heard that the goats would eat anything, and they thought that if they let the goats loose in their house like a sort-of primitive Roomba, that the goats would happily munch their way through 20 years of paper plates and used feminine products.

Instead, the goats ate the dogs’ food and shat everywhere. Soon, they had an inch of goat pellets to help visually set off the diaper mountain which had accumulated when their then-teenager was a baby.

They went on holiday and came back to only one goat.

A year later, you could still smell the rot from the road.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:30, Reply)

20+ years ago
I used to be a TV Engineer (back in the day when people had them repaired) and would spend most of the day visiting customers homes. Generally they were okay; some ocd spotless, others less so, but no need to call out Kim & Aggie...apart from one.

Even after all these years I can remember it was on Burrwood Drive, Adswood in Stockport - the entire road has since been demolished. I have no idea what the original colour of the carpet was in the room where the TV was, but it was now dark and sticky. The room was littered with used disposable nappies and there were a few kids running around - at least one in only a vest and no nappy, together with a few dogs. These must have all contributed to the pervasive smell, which was further heightened with it being a hot summers day. Looking back, I did well not to heave and add to it, I suspect others hadn't had the self control.

The final straw was kneeling down to take the back off the TV set and feeling my knees go wet, not damp, visibly wet. The TV went straight back to the workshop for repair.

I spent the rest of the day trying to ignore the smell that had attached itself to me and I made sure someone else took that set back.

It could've been a lot worse, I could have lived there and thought it was normal to live like that.

Apologies for length...first time I've ever had to say that.
(RTFM May your god go with you, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:21, Reply)

U bend mushrooms
Back in the days of our student flat hygiene was an optional quality.

One day we noticed a mushroom growing on the U-bend coming out the back of the toilet.

Rather than clean up we named him "Horace" and would water him with warm water to keep him alive. Was still there when we moved out a year later :)
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:13, 2 replies)

Phil the baleful root vegetable
Through an as-yet inexplicable turn of events, a small potato found its way onto my kitchen windowsill. Being starved of pet attention and generally disinclined towards tidying, I christened this root vegetable ‘Phil’. Phil, my pet potato.

Phil lived on through the warm months and the cold, sitting self-importantly in his potato bowers overlooking my overgrown Camden garden. He gained a jaunty cap, a perceptive smirk and a few admirers as, though the seasons, he took on a green and craggy demeanour. His smile became a menacing smirk and even his little stalks of potato ‘eyes’ dimmed, turned to dust, and blew away. In the end, Phil was half the potato he once was. It was hard to see Phil like this and, during the revolutionary act of cleaning, Phil was callously buried in drawer with some other useless life accoutrements.

A decade passed. I gained employment and a healthy respect for germs. I moved to the country and, upon unpacking my kitchen, found Phil – stone-solid and alone.

Some things never change, though. I crammed him in a drawer because throwing him away would have been too much like work. There he stays.

Hundreds of years from now, archaeologists will dig up a petrified potato with a lipstick grin and a dunce cap and pass some sort of judgement over our civilisation.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:12, 2 replies)

We all have friends who are filthy and disgusting and if you don't then it is probably you.
I pulled up outside Dave's and parked next to the burnt out Astra as I couldn't get into the drive due to the scrap cars, rubbish and old mattresses which were crawling with rats. On the law was a dead dog in quite an advanced state of decomposition. The pathway appeared to be tarmaced but on closer inspection it was revealed to be countless animal turds which had dried and had been flattened down over the years. I approached to door and noticed the overflowing drain which smelt of vomit. A scum crust had formed on top like a rice pudding skin and occasional bubbles would emerge at the surface, which would let off a sweet pungent vile aroma as they burst. I knocked the door as I didn't want to touch the bell push as there was grey/green matter dangling from it like a piece of fresh nose snot. I heard Dave shout out, "'ang on a minute mate, I'll be right there", followed by lots of crashing and banging as he made through the empty beer cans and debris on his way to let me in.

Eventually the door opened. A strong musty smell and a cloud of flys hit me as the door swung open. Dave was standing there in a string vest and a pair of torn xxl Y-Fronts. A yellow map of cyprus festooned the torn gray front and a brown stripe which culminated with a dark hole which had rotted through the gusset close to his arsehole.
He was unshaved and was giving off a strong B.O. smell but he's my mate so I ignored it. The hallway was floor to ceiling high in black bin bags. I don't know what was in them although I swear I saw one move. "Mind yer feet", Dave warned me, as we made our way to the back room. I looked down to see several quite fresh turds and dead rodents. I reached out to turn the knob on the door to the back room. Dave quickly kicked the door open to stop me from touching the door knob. "You wouldn't want to touch that mate", Dave said, giving me a knowing wink. "Come through mate, take a seat", Dave said, sweeping a pile of rubbish off the sofa with his arm. I sat down and immediately became slightly uncomfortable as I felt the warm dampness soaking through my clothing. Dave went out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and I just sat on this filthy sofa stroking the cat. Only after a few minutes I realised that the cat was dead and from the ooze eminating from its eyes, it became clear it had been dead for some time. The floor was virtually covered in old mouse chewed pizza boxes, take-away cartons, discarded sanitary towels and tampons, knotted condoms and bits of old food which had formed fluffy turquoise growths. Just then a rat ran across the room. Dave gently lifted a leg and brought his foot down hard on top of the doomed rodent as it passed underneath. As he stamped on the rat there was a loud squeak which was harmonised with the crunching of the bones and fluids hitting the wall. Dave just carried on as if nothing had happened.

As we sat drinking tea and chatting about beer, girls and football I looked over at something which had caught my eye. There was a large pool of vomit by the window which was being consumed by at least four rats. A melodious humming was present in the room as a cloud of flys hovered over the puke and turds, most which had grown a white mould coat. I took my mug back to the kitchen. A huge pile of pans and plates all with varying degrees of mould and filth, towered above the cracked sink which stunk of urine. Another dead cat was laying under the table. The belly moving around with the pocket of maggots wriggling inside. At the kitchen table was Dave's girfriend Derekella. A girl who was not blessed with much intelligence, looks, figure or personallity. She reminded me of the late Jade Goody only less attractive and less fragrent. She had only just got up and was sitting in her nightie which was just a large t-shirt. I was probably white once and had a logo on the front which I couldn't make out as it had been obscured with the stains of many a meal and ground in dirt. She was menstruating heavily but had not bothered using anything to contain the issue which was now dripping down her legs with the occasional clot falling off and landing on the floor next to her. She was smoking a cigarette which seemed to be stuck between her lips. A large gray ash fell from the cigarette and into her tea which she ignored. As I greeted her she lifted a single arse cheek from the chair and produced a fart a rugby player would have been proud to produce in the showers after a match. Sadly she had not taken into concideration the fact she was slightly loose that day and she followed through a bit. Some of the sticky brown shyte had found its way into a cardboard box containing dirty disposable nappies which she was going to scrape out and use again.

Soon it was time for me to leave and return home. Their house was disgustingly filthy. The smell was so strong it was making my eyes water. The dirt so ground in a bomb could not shift it and many dead creatures were laying around in various states of rotting. There was not a single area of floor which wasn't soiled with excrement, vomit and the blood and clots dripping from Derekella's gaping filthy minge. Still, it was a palace compared to mine.
(Mrs N is having her blobstrop on, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:10, 5 replies)

The tale of Rob and his paper bag
Apologies for length in advance, this is going to be pretty long but it is one of the incidents that has happened to me that I have been waiting to use in a QOTW.

I have mentioned my old housemate Rob a few times before on this site, this is the story that everyone who knows him will bring it up every so often and happened when he was still at my place (He rented a room off of me).

The house was never the cleanest place, we were a couple of young free and single blokes that only wanted to go out, get drunk and have a laugh. As time passed I met a rather hot young woman who I started dating and eventually moved into the place with us (Referred to as C), Rob was getting pretty serious with a woman himself and he had been seeing on and off for a while and eventually decided to take the plunge and move in with her instead.

Rob sorted out a moving van and both me and C decided to offer our help clearing out his room, a place I had not been in since we decorated it prior to him moving in. Oh.Dear.God.

The first thing we realised was that you could not see the carpet. It was covered in a layer of dirty clothes that Rob had placed in appropriate zones for each occasion. The side of his bed was the part he labelled football shirts for playing 5 a side footy each week, the foot of the bed was his going out clothes and the far end of the room was where he kept his (Rather mouldy looking) Kwik Save uniforms.
My other half chipped in

C: Erm Rob why don’t you wash this stuff, I always ask you if you needed anything when I was doing a load?
Rob: I didn’t want you to spend your time washing my stuff in the sink or bath, If I get it really filthy I can do it myself
C: Rob we have a washing machine downstairs in the kitchen
Rob: Where?
Me: That big white thing as you go in the kitchen, you cant miss it mate I showed it to you when you moved in, and you cant help but hear it when its on every couple of days
Rob: Oh yeah…..Never mind maybe later they still have a few more wears in them
Me: Rob what about the smell of sweat you can see the dried sweat patches under the arms of this one
Rob: That’s what the air fresheners I bought are for (Douses air with a peach air freshener). Noone is bothered when you go out anyway
(Me and C give each other a worried look)

Eventually we cleared the floor and moved the clothing bags out to his car (6 bin bags full of sweaty clothing that he admitted had been hardly washed in the 3 years he had been living with me). Worse was yet to come. During the cleanup operation we also found a number of yogurts Rob had decided to eat in bed and had left them on the floor after eating them, never taking the empty pots or cutlery downstairs with him, the result was a number of spoon totally unusable as the spoons had welded themselves to the plastic pot thanks to the small amount of leftover yogurt in the bottom. At this point I was wondering how the hell I hadn’t noticed the smell until I was interrupted by C screaming. She had picked up a paper bag from the side of Robs bed and looked into it to see if there was anything in it before throwing it away.

She had found condoms. Used ones that were rather fragrant from the look of it. I knew that Robs other half had not been over since last weekend.

Me: Rob, Why the hell do you have a bag of used johnny’s? I know it can be a bit of a chore getting rid of the thing after sex but try and throw it the morning after, your missuis hasn't been here since last Saturday.
Rob: Oh that’s not from one nights effort. Thats my shag bag, I’ve been keeping it since I moved in to see how many times I’ve fucked someone
Me:So that bags got 3 years worth of used condoms in
Rob: Yup, well the ones that I had to use protection with anyway, any others I decided to go au natural with I made a biro mark on the side of the bag
C (in-between gipping from the nose full of crusty jizz tainted air she just got from opening the bag): Why the hell would anyone do that?
Rob: Urm… to show your mates?
Me: Seriously mate keep notes in a diary or something that’s wrong. (Who the hell would want to see this?)
Rob: Sod that, women would think you were weird writing stuff in a book after doing them
C: And keeping all the used condoms isn’t?

Despite our protests Rob still took the bag with him. I have missed a lot of the other basic food related crap we found but the post was starting to look a bit epic and a reminder of the condom bag left me feeling a little off. Thank god he was too lazy to make a scrap book.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:09, 5 replies)

My mother is pretty much obsessed with cleaning
I can understand why. We have a large family and a very big house, and the presence of several children means things get very untidy very quickly. But it genuinely seems as though it never stops. However even the best cleaners make mistakes.

A few years ago we lived in a very large old Georgian house. There were about thirty rooms to clean, even with the extension sealed off. However hard she worked, things got overlooked. And one of the problems of big houses that don't have the recommended staff of four people, and instead just one women and her part time cleaner is mice.

In the chicken pen outside you'd occasionally see the odd rat, and eventually my parents bought my brother an air-rifle and told him to try and frighten them off. He got more seagulls than rats. Inside the house fed by the odd sandwich falling to the floor and not being seen, there were mice. My mother can't stand them, and her cleaning binges got even more extreme after an incident in the front living room where she came down one morning in her spike-heeled boots to find a book, heard a squeal, looked down and realised she had skewered a mouse on her heel. Not a dead mouse, a live mouse. After that it was the exterminators in.
( Amberl was stripey and dominated Europe, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:59, 1 reply)

Animal
I used to live with a complete animal. Think I may have posted this before.

He was a born again Christian with the belief that nothing would harm him unless it was God's will, and if it was God's will, then it couldn't be avoided anyway and was his due. He didn't see the point in the most basic of human hygiene as "illness was punishment from God".

So he didn't wash. Ever. Neither himself, not his clothes but more crucially for this story, the dishes. He was a mental. A really smelly mental.

In the kitchen on the side was his "washing up bowl". A washing up bowl filled with water on the first day of term, with a lid, in which he'd periodically "soak" his plates for an hour or two to remove any food detritus. He'd then wipe his plates on his t-shirt and re-use them.

Our flat started to smell like fungal growth on a tramps' bell end, so naturally, something had to be done.

When I prised the lid off this bowl (having drawn straws and lost), I was faced with a gloopy, layered and coloured substance that looked like the rings of Saturn. Except with more carrots. I was immediately sick into the bowl, as was my housemate.

We managed to carry the bowl outside, periodically vomiting on ourselves as we went, then left it outside with a note on the lid saying "do not open".

We then spent the rest of the afternoon watching curious passers by open the lid to look inside, with about a 50/50 vomit to non-vomit ratio.

Happy days.
( rofl harris, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:59, 3 replies)

It was the first day of term...
"You just pour some milk into a mug, sit a light bulb in it, put it in the microwave and the bulb lights up... it's great."

"Woooooowww" we chorused as the bulb sparked into life before our heavy-lidded eyes, but our fascination passed after a few short blinks and attention was swiftly returned to watching a mushroom head chase a small dinosaur while a princess and an Italian fired shells and dropped bananas.

The bulb remained in milk atop the microwave and drew occasional curious glances throughout the remaining year. Soon its position was fortified by discarded pizza boxes, unwashed utensils and at least one flashing yellow light, drunkenly lifted from a nearby roadworks, as though our living cliché wasn't already sufficient enough.

It remained there as each term trundled into the next; gradually fading from view amid the ever growing mound of ming that swallowed the space we once called our kitchen. It was the first step on a swift journey towards a complete health hazard and it was the last thing to be removed at the end of the year.

"Wooooowww." we chorused as the bulb was lifted at arms length from its mouldy home. "That's truly fucking disgusting..." and so it was.
( Moey, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:44, 1 reply)

My grandparents use those plastic cereal containers...
...you know, you decant the cereal in to them and then you can seal them properly, better than cardboard boxes...

Anyway, they're never cleaned. In the bottom of the cornflakes box lurk the remains of muesli, perhaps a few coco pops... the last bowlful from any box looks like pick and mix. This would be fine- I mean, it's cereal, right?

So, when I was fifteen, I noticed some odd black specks in the bran flakes. I tell my grandparents about it, thinking they'll deal with it, and just stop eating the stuff.

A few weeks later the cereal is still there... and so are the black dots. I ask my grandparents about it and they say it's just "burned bits" and it "still tastes fine". I disagree, but don't argue the point... and don't eat the cereal.

After a few more weeks the level of cereal in the box is depleted, having been eaten. After another week the black specks hatch into a swarm of baby moths.

The boxes got cleaned after that. ;-)
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:38, 9 replies)

For god's sake woman, don't do it!
Blah student blah ten boys in the house etc etc etc

My girlfriend stayed over most nights, and was suitably exasperated by the grotty fetidness us cock-sporters seemed happy to nest in.

Most of all though, she hated the shower.

It didn't seem too bad to the men of the house. A tiny room with a tiled floor, and a raised, pitted square to stand in and shower. No mats or rugs to worry about. The problem, though, was that after several months living there the water wasn't draining down the plughole. So by the end of your wash you'd be ankle deep in tepid water. My girlfriend found this repulsive, and resolved to fix it. How?

"I'll use a fork."

I'm actually starting to boke right now, remembering this.
A handful of us man-children crowded round the open doorway as my girlfriend, bright as a button and clad in marigolds, got down on her knees (steady ...), and confidently jabbed a dinner fork down the plughole. After a few inches it met resistance, so she pushed harder (just stop it, you filthy buggers), and whatever was down there slowly yielded to the prongs. My housemates and I just stared wordlessly, waiting. With grim determination, she started to twist the fork round and round, and if you listened, you could hear something happening – like a tiny wellington boot lifting itself out of some mud.

twist, squelch, twiiiiist, squeeeeelch ...

"Right, that should do it," she finally announced, and with us looking on silent with anxiety, she pulled on the fork. It started sliding up slowly at first, then all too quickly, it burst out with a plop, and my poor, helpful girlfriend was left squatting there holding ... something. It's still hard to compute to this day. Afterwards, over strong coffee and spliffs, we referred to it as "the Devil's pasta". It was definitely grey, and glistening. It was as though someone had put a large, rotting rat corpse through a mincer, then spent a good hour spitting snot over it, before helpfully forcing it into our plumbing and sealing it in with week-old spunk. It certainly smelt like this was the case.

That was the first and only time that I've seen an inanimate object make a grown-up puke. God bless her though, she went back and bagged it up. Us men couldn't help. We were hiding in our rooms within 30 seconds of that fucking thing seeing the light of day.
( Wet-chinned bag shanker Cannot parse Wogan, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:35, 4 replies)

Entire squad bar me given 50.
I was in the cadets, it was summer, and we were in short sleeve order, being inspected by the real army during a stint of staying with them to get a more accurate feel of what the army is actually like.

Being the aspiring punk I was, I had a bunch of crap around my left wrist, including the top of a four-pack of beer.

Now, I am actually quite intelligent, but can be incredibly stupid at times, though also have something of a reputation for being a wag, or "irritating wise-arsed cunt" as many prefer to call me.

The RSM moved slowly down the line, picking fault with every man, but when he got to me, saw my wrist, and dear gods was STRAIGHT up in my face "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT ON THE END OF YOUR FUCKING WRIST YOU FUCKING MORON?" he screamed.

I looked down at my wrist, and in one of those lucidly stupid moments, responded with genuine honesty of what I saw:

"My hand, Sergeant."

And the entire squad bar me was given 50.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:06, 3 replies)

When I ws a filthy student
Not a patch on most of the stories here.

Moved into a house in Croydon, which had a seperate shower and bath. A few weeks after I moved in, a bee popped his clogs and fell in the bath. As everybody used the shower, the bee became a permanent feature.

I lived there for two years, and every time my mother came to visit, she would check on the bee, and comment. When I left, I thought about taking it with me as a souvenir, but I got stoned instead, and forgot.

And just to balance the story, fast forward 20 years or so - a few months ago my brother and I were mooching around my mothers kitchen for something to eat, and found a pot of mixed spice that was 14 years past it's best by date.
( Not Pineapple anymore, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:02, 3 replies)

at 17 showing mum and dad i was a man and didn't need looking after
moved into a caravan, with 3 aquaintances of aquaintances of a friend's, sister's boyfriend, about 20 km from from mum and dad's in the middle of a market gardening area.
turns out they were heroin addicts - cleaning the van was not a priority and looked like it hadn't been for a few years. too much filth to go into but i will comment about "the soup" - this was what we ate every day. on the stove there was a 10 gallon pot that was generally on a low heat, cooking. when the level of the contents got to a line indicating about 1/4, fresh ingredients were added to the remaining soup and topped up with water- these were generally vegetables stolen from the surrounding paddocks, sometimes even washed, every so often meat was added, usually during the lambing season - a month old lamb minus skin and sometimes guts.
i returned home after 6 weeks, a lot lighter and not very well.
In later years i often saw the same junkies in town, they were never ill and in fact considering their addiction, always looked reasonably healthy.
(wallynothere rnot without protection, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 10:01, Reply)

I can't be the only one here with this philosophy
I'm happy to have just one nice room and that's all. I keep the living room tidy and make sure the kitchen surfaces are clean and the pots are done. Apart from that, everything's tickety-boo.

Though I am an awful hoarder. That combined with chronic procrastination means that clutter does accumulate. A few examples:

In the cupboard under the stairs is a 6ft high pile of computer magazines. (PC Pro, Computer Shopper etc), not one is less than 5 years old. I intended to read the articles and then leave them one by one in waiting rooms. Not just that but there are other computer magazines in cupboards upstairs including cover disks. Not just that, but I've kept all of the wife's back issues of Performance Bike from the early 90s.

Under our bed is an old suitcase full of clothes I haven't been able to get into for at least 10 years. Also includes some of Mrs Sandettie's clothes that I particularly enjoyed seeing her in.

Bottom of my wardrobe are several bags of wires and cables. Adapters, computer cables, extensions and god knows how many SCART leads.

Ring binders containing old college work from 5 years ago. I won't let the missus get rid of her college work from 10 years ago. I saw how much effort she put into it and it just seems wrong to bin it all.

One of Mrs SLVA's friends is the complete opposite. Her mantra is that if it has not been used in 6 months and isn't Xmas decorations or photographs then get shut of it. She has a point and I'm coming around to the idea. Though I don't like binning stuff unless I think someone else could make use of it. Stuff has been given away via Freecycle, though no one wants the PC magazines.

I got up this morning with the best intentions, but then whilst having my breakfast, began reading this QOTW, which was a mistake as I've realised that I'm nowhere near as bad as some others.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 9:58, 1 reply)

My problem is clutter. Particularly hoarding stuff I no longer need or use.
As I sit here gazing at my keyboard, markedly saturnine as I probe my inner muse, my eyes flit towards the paragon of disorder that is my desk. Strewn across its dishevelled faux-veneer is a treasure trove of trinkets and knick-knacks; each as worthless as the next and yet just as useful as the last.

There, amongst the elderly mobile phones, blank optical media, USB leads, stationery, bootlaces and the charger for an iPod Shuffle is the pretender. An extraneous plastic card entitling me to membership to the RAC. A trivial orange plastic rectangle which is utterly useless as I had let the subscription lapse - a risky gamble when driving a charabanc such as mine. Scrutinising this piddling token of vehicle recovery entitlement is the most jarring of errors. It grates my eyes much like the number seven to someone who is learning 'pi' to only twelve decimal places.

The RAC have spelt my surname incorrectly. The bastards
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 9:25, 3 replies)

My ex puked (mostly) into a cup and left it on the table next to the bed for two weeks.
I kept asking her to do something with it. She kept not doing anything with it. It was pretty funky, and not just because it was bright pink, but also because it fucking stank of sick.
(Mortal Wombat - he's just an excitable boy, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 8:52, 3 replies)

my parents
When I was a teenager I found a bag of ming mixed with water in my parent's fridge. It had once been celery. Out of curiosity I looked for a use by date, it was the previous December. I made the discovery in February.

My Dad was in charge of laundry and chucked all the socks into one big box when they were dry. We all ended up constantly wearing odd socks as a consequence of this. The solution? Throw all the odd socks away. Fine, until the next batch of laundry comes round with all the partners in it. He used to throw away all the 'odd' socks about once a year and couldn't get to grips with the fact he was just making the problem worse.

He has also been known to boil eggs in the kettle and make tea with the water.

My Mum told me when he was a student he would have a weekly bath, then wash his clothes and dishes in the same water, in that order.
( bland is bland, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 3:29, 4 replies)

Oh goodie, one I actually answer
I live and work in student halls, and have done from some 6 years . . . OH DEAR. Some of the major milestones in this 'career' have been:

Shit in the tumble dryer. . . Some vile and reprohensible individual felt the urge to do this, but not only that, they filmed themselves doing the dastardly deed, and putting some unsuspecting shill's trainers in for good measure. This is worse than one would imagine, as the smell of baked faeces pervails for months. Said students, once the recording had come to light, were tasked with cleaning the dryer with a wallpaper scraper and a bucket. They were then charged around £1500 to replace the dryer, which is about a term of rent money.

Along a similar vein, there was one foul soul who thought that shitting in a wok and stir frying it would be the jape of the century.

Another flat attempted to fill their bathtub with urine, (6 boys, 6 girls, sadly for my gender, you can guess which side it was) and needless to say, it got very very manky (Anyone spotting a trend?). though another flat filled a bathtub half up with jelly.

The aforementioned vomit in the sink growing mould is a common favourate.

It's not uncommon to see rooms full of month old binbags and acumulated pizza boxes. These often get to the point of rat, mouse, and bug infestation (centepede things are the worst).

Though one of the more unusual (and pleasnt) people was a chap called Boris. He was from Yougoslavia or somewhere, really nice chap, but somewhat mental. I was once tasked with inspecting his flat, and in his bedroom was a mig welder, 3 bikes, and on the walls were spraypaint outlins of the frames he had made. Very tallented, but daft as a brush.

Another 'career' high point was a promotion due to the previous CSR (or RA for those of a more colonial persuasion)quitting due to rather boisterous flat mates, who welcomed me with the gift of a used condom, coitous creame and all, tied neatly to my doorhandle. Needless to say, they made my life a mysery for 6 months, where in I threw away all the dishes twice, and had external cleaners come in and deal with the 'biohazard'.

Though the absolute top, worst, most vile and disgusting has to be. . . Cleaning up the EFL blocks. In the summer, those of us with no place better to go are offered minimum wage to gut uni accomodation. The EFL blocks are usually the worst. Now I don't know what it is about them, but the Chinese students seem to have a nak for making their flats really really unpleasnt places. I'm not trying to insite any racial hatred or anything, they're pleasnt enough people, very studious, if somewhat quiet, but somehow their blocks aquire a heavy, musty odour and unusual amounts of carpet, wall, and soft furnature soiling. One flat was so vile that everything in the kitchen, including the kettle, fridge, freezer, and draw handles, was covered in ground pork.

Appologies for length, and lack of hummus, but I never did encounter any of that on my travels.
(Spiked_Rycroft The Prodigal Son, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 2:58, 3 replies)

I live in what looks like a display home...
Nothing is ever dirty or dusty or out of place.
Of course none of this is ever my doing, but my wife, whose best effort to date was cleaning the bath between contractions when our baby finally decided to arrive.
It was only after she was finished that she decided to give me a bell at work to let me know I might want to head home...
( difficultchild, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 2:23, Reply)

I lived with a friend once who was more than a little obsessive about cleanliness...
Multiple examples could fill this post, but best of all was before vacuuming she'd walk around the house sprinkling handfuls (hands full?) of uncooked rice all over the carpets and floor, then after vacuuming she's inspect. A single grain of rice meant she'd not done a decent job in that room so she'd start again.
( difficultchild, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 2:01, 4 replies)

My friend Afro-Jimmy
Once noticed something 'crawl from under his bed'

This was the maggot-ridden cluster of wretched and rotten tangerines that he had previously discarded when he became addicted to cannabis many months ago.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 1:58, Reply)

I'm sure many people can relate to this
My mum was TERRIBLY house proud. Every two months, I would wake up at 9am to the horrible smell of bleach. I'd waddle down to the kitchen with my eyes still almost sealed shut to find her removing the contents of the kitchen to the dining room and rearranging the cupboards. Somehow I'd get involved in this, despite it being Saturday.

The poor woman's currently waiting to see if she's in remission from cancer, and I still go home sometimes and have no idea where the fucking plates are.
( Methylene Blue - electrohead, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 1:06, 2 replies)