I used to clean bathrooms in a Manhattan shopping mall. I now have a tiny human. Cleaning the bathrooms was much, much more disgusting. It has been nearly 15 years and I still think about the horrible things I witnessed at that job. Changing my daughter’s diaper doesn’t even register to me as a gross thing to deal with.

Any particularly uh, pungent anecdotes to share?

It was mostly things that you would expect, given the job and location. People doing their business where they shouldn’t, mostly, but also sex, drug use, bleeding, shaving, vomit, flushing syringes and condoms down toilets and clogging them, etc. The most disgusting one I personally had to deal with involved finger painting with feces and menstrual blood. This isn’t really gross but my supervisor discovered an OD death in one of the bathrooms one morning and I’m grateful I never had to see that because I’d probably be afraid to discover another each morning if I had. That job offered me a lot of perspective and I’m happy I worked it but it was also frequently disgusting!

> I sometimes wonder about the people who must clean messy public restrooms. All of the gross, none of the "but it's for the sake of a cute human that I love".

I worked "maintenance" at a local outlet mall back in college so I was that guy, and after the first couple of times it was just a matter of "this needs to be done, I'm the guy who does it" turning my brain off and getting the job done. I remember basically nothing from those evenings, I would just put my headphones on and mentally be somewhere else.

It was a shit job in a lot of ways, figuratively and literally, but at the same time I had amazing work/life balance. From the moment I clocked out until the next time I clocked in what happened at the outlet mall was not my problem in any way and I didn't have to think about it at all.