dumb story #2
Sep. 22nd, 2003 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanThis is turning out to be fun.
I have two SCOPE stories.
When I was about 15 or 16, my high school got involved with this program called SCOPE -- School Community Outreach Program for the Elderly. The idea behind it was that high school kids who do odd jobs for elderly and handicapped people who otherwise would not have been able to afford to hire someone.
It was only minimum-wage, for a few hours a week, but at 15 there weren't too many other jobs I could get. So I signed myself up and ended up working for them for a couple of years.
Most of the people I dealt with were real sweethearts -- there was the elderly man that I used to dust for because he was asthmatic and who always wanted me to sit down with him afterwards for tea and cookies. The woman who's husband had just had a heart attack and who could not herself drag the heavy mower up the steep hill of their lawn always brought me glasses of lemonade and asked me how classes where going. The elderly woman who was recovering from hip replacement surgery and who needed somebody to do her grocery shopping always wanted to tell me stories about her daughters who lived back in England.
Most of the kids in the program buggered off during the summer months, but my girlfriend and I stayed on.
It was during the summer that the Children's Aid Society got in touch with the program looking for some teenagers who could work for them for a week cleaning a house.
Four of us met at the address they gave us and introduced ourselves to the social worker in charge. He gave us the story; they had been contacted by the local Board of Education because their records showed an 8 year-old living in the house with her grandmother and the girl had never been registered for school. Children's Aid had visited the house and discovered the place was what he discribed as "a disaster". They needed somebody to come and do the grunt work of cleaning it up, and all the services they had contacted had either wanted to charge a prohibitive amount or had flat out refused.
That was where we came in.
"Don't give me your answer right away," he told us. "Check it out first. There will be no problem if you say no."
And the four of us trooped single-file into the foulest house I have ever seen.
There was a footpath of sorts by which you could wend your way from room to room. All over available space was taken up by piles of clothes, take-out food containers, paper and unidentifiable crap. There was an armchair with only a small pile of clothes on the cushion, the back stained with something oily and brown, I assumed that was the grandmother's regular chair. The corner of a couch peeked out of a stack of empty pizza boxes. The stove was covered with a thick dark yellow sludge over it's entire surface -- it was inaccessable anyway through the stacks of trash leaning against it.
Still single file -- because that's all we had room for -- we all trooped back outside. A fat wasp lifted lazily off one of the piles and flew upstairs as we passed.
The social worker was waiting for us outside. "What do you say?" he asked us.
At that moment the little girl wandered outside. She was small for her age and very thin. She eyed us warily, then squatted in the lawn, picking at the toys strewn among the overgrown weeds. The back of her shirt had the unmistakable faded brown stain of dried pee.
We looked at her. We looked at each other. We looked at him.
"I'm in."
We broke up into two teams, with my girlfriend and I starting on the top floor. There was a small back bedroom that was heaped mostly with dry stuff -- old clothes and furniture and the like -- so we cleared that out first and then used it as our storage space for the bags of laundry. Then we moved on to the bedrooms.
Both rooms were equally nasty. The floor was buried under piles of garbage and filthy clothes. The beds were bare piss-stained matresses lying on the piles of filth.
Children's Aid rented a dumpster and we carted bag after bag down the stairs, carefully sorting the salvagable clothing from the mass. We tried to keep all the discarded food containers in one piece, but occasionally a wet bag would burst open as we lifted it, showering twisting white larvae along with the dried chicken bones onto the floor. There was other wildlife too -- a trace of some syrupy sweet liqueur in the bottom of a bottle writhed with earwigs. We picked up plastic bags full of candy and cockroaches. Centipedes scurried out from under disturbed piles of trash. The unmistakable black streaks of bedbug eggs lined the baseboards.
The little girl never spoke to us, although occasionally she would bring things to the one male in our group. The CAS worker told us she didn't like women. When we started cleaning out her bedroom, she slid into the room watching us warily for a while from the opposite corner. Once she figured out what we were doing she scuttled past us long enough to fetch one of the plastic bags and started enthusiastically shoving trash into it. We cleaned up a chest that we found under a heap of rotten food and left the lid up, whenever she found a toy she would carefully wipe it off and deposit it into the chest. She never said a word the entire time.
A large amount of really graphic hardcore porn went into those garbage bags.
It ended up taking five days for the four of us to clear out the entire house, a surprisingly short time given the amount of mess. Every day the CAS worker would meet us there with sandwiches and drinks that we ate on the front porch. Every night my girlfriend and I would come home and immediately throw our clothes into the laundry and our bodies into the shower. Then we would sit on the back stoop and breathe the ammonia-free air for hours before we crashed from the sheer physical exhaustion.
By the end of it the storage room was full of bags of clothes to be picked up by a service for laundering. The walls and floors had been swept free of the last clinging trails of wet paper and crust. The furniture to be thrown out and replaced was stacked against one wall, the furniture to be cleaned was stacked against another. People were coming in to inspect the walls and see if they could be cleaned or if the drywall would need to be patched. An exterminator was in the basement. The CAS worker handed us each a cheque for the hours worked and thanked us profusely for our help. When the school year started up again the teacher in charge of the program told us that a letter praising our work had been sent to the school.
Eighteen years later, my partners and I purchased a crack house and turned it into Roxton Manor.
Moving in required a dozen or so trips to the city dump, two visits from an exterminator and several weeks of elbow grease. The cold room required the removal of six bags of trash before I could even open the door fully to get out the rest of it. A dozen bags of discarded clothes went to goodwill, the rest were so rotton they fell apart when I picked them up. We had to hire somebody to clean all the garbage from the heating vent in my room because it was completely filled with trash, including clothes, magazines, a sandwich and several used condoms. Two whole days were spent doing nothing but scrubbing cockroach eggs and fesces off of surfaces we couldn't just paint over -- every couple of hours we had to stand in the middle of the room doing the "Ew" dance and chanting "ICan'tBeleivePeopleCanLiveLikeThis" just to maintain our equilibrium in the face of the task.
Every once in a while somebody would say something along the lines of "Isn't this the grossest thing you've ever had to do in your life?"
And I be able to answer them, "Well -- no. Not really."
I have two SCOPE stories.
When I was about 15 or 16, my high school got involved with this program called SCOPE -- School Community Outreach Program for the Elderly. The idea behind it was that high school kids who do odd jobs for elderly and handicapped people who otherwise would not have been able to afford to hire someone.
It was only minimum-wage, for a few hours a week, but at 15 there weren't too many other jobs I could get. So I signed myself up and ended up working for them for a couple of years.
Most of the people I dealt with were real sweethearts -- there was the elderly man that I used to dust for because he was asthmatic and who always wanted me to sit down with him afterwards for tea and cookies. The woman who's husband had just had a heart attack and who could not herself drag the heavy mower up the steep hill of their lawn always brought me glasses of lemonade and asked me how classes where going. The elderly woman who was recovering from hip replacement surgery and who needed somebody to do her grocery shopping always wanted to tell me stories about her daughters who lived back in England.
Most of the kids in the program buggered off during the summer months, but my girlfriend and I stayed on.
It was during the summer that the Children's Aid Society got in touch with the program looking for some teenagers who could work for them for a week cleaning a house.
Four of us met at the address they gave us and introduced ourselves to the social worker in charge. He gave us the story; they had been contacted by the local Board of Education because their records showed an 8 year-old living in the house with her grandmother and the girl had never been registered for school. Children's Aid had visited the house and discovered the place was what he discribed as "a disaster". They needed somebody to come and do the grunt work of cleaning it up, and all the services they had contacted had either wanted to charge a prohibitive amount or had flat out refused.
That was where we came in.
"Don't give me your answer right away," he told us. "Check it out first. There will be no problem if you say no."
And the four of us trooped single-file into the foulest house I have ever seen.
There was a footpath of sorts by which you could wend your way from room to room. All over available space was taken up by piles of clothes, take-out food containers, paper and unidentifiable crap. There was an armchair with only a small pile of clothes on the cushion, the back stained with something oily and brown, I assumed that was the grandmother's regular chair. The corner of a couch peeked out of a stack of empty pizza boxes. The stove was covered with a thick dark yellow sludge over it's entire surface -- it was inaccessable anyway through the stacks of trash leaning against it.
Still single file -- because that's all we had room for -- we all trooped back outside. A fat wasp lifted lazily off one of the piles and flew upstairs as we passed.
The social worker was waiting for us outside. "What do you say?" he asked us.
At that moment the little girl wandered outside. She was small for her age and very thin. She eyed us warily, then squatted in the lawn, picking at the toys strewn among the overgrown weeds. The back of her shirt had the unmistakable faded brown stain of dried pee.
We looked at her. We looked at each other. We looked at him.
"I'm in."
We broke up into two teams, with my girlfriend and I starting on the top floor. There was a small back bedroom that was heaped mostly with dry stuff -- old clothes and furniture and the like -- so we cleared that out first and then used it as our storage space for the bags of laundry. Then we moved on to the bedrooms.
Both rooms were equally nasty. The floor was buried under piles of garbage and filthy clothes. The beds were bare piss-stained matresses lying on the piles of filth.
Children's Aid rented a dumpster and we carted bag after bag down the stairs, carefully sorting the salvagable clothing from the mass. We tried to keep all the discarded food containers in one piece, but occasionally a wet bag would burst open as we lifted it, showering twisting white larvae along with the dried chicken bones onto the floor. There was other wildlife too -- a trace of some syrupy sweet liqueur in the bottom of a bottle writhed with earwigs. We picked up plastic bags full of candy and cockroaches. Centipedes scurried out from under disturbed piles of trash. The unmistakable black streaks of bedbug eggs lined the baseboards.
The little girl never spoke to us, although occasionally she would bring things to the one male in our group. The CAS worker told us she didn't like women. When we started cleaning out her bedroom, she slid into the room watching us warily for a while from the opposite corner. Once she figured out what we were doing she scuttled past us long enough to fetch one of the plastic bags and started enthusiastically shoving trash into it. We cleaned up a chest that we found under a heap of rotten food and left the lid up, whenever she found a toy she would carefully wipe it off and deposit it into the chest. She never said a word the entire time.
A large amount of really graphic hardcore porn went into those garbage bags.
It ended up taking five days for the four of us to clear out the entire house, a surprisingly short time given the amount of mess. Every day the CAS worker would meet us there with sandwiches and drinks that we ate on the front porch. Every night my girlfriend and I would come home and immediately throw our clothes into the laundry and our bodies into the shower. Then we would sit on the back stoop and breathe the ammonia-free air for hours before we crashed from the sheer physical exhaustion.
By the end of it the storage room was full of bags of clothes to be picked up by a service for laundering. The walls and floors had been swept free of the last clinging trails of wet paper and crust. The furniture to be thrown out and replaced was stacked against one wall, the furniture to be cleaned was stacked against another. People were coming in to inspect the walls and see if they could be cleaned or if the drywall would need to be patched. An exterminator was in the basement. The CAS worker handed us each a cheque for the hours worked and thanked us profusely for our help. When the school year started up again the teacher in charge of the program told us that a letter praising our work had been sent to the school.
Eighteen years later, my partners and I purchased a crack house and turned it into Roxton Manor.
Moving in required a dozen or so trips to the city dump, two visits from an exterminator and several weeks of elbow grease. The cold room required the removal of six bags of trash before I could even open the door fully to get out the rest of it. A dozen bags of discarded clothes went to goodwill, the rest were so rotton they fell apart when I picked them up. We had to hire somebody to clean all the garbage from the heating vent in my room because it was completely filled with trash, including clothes, magazines, a sandwich and several used condoms. Two whole days were spent doing nothing but scrubbing cockroach eggs and fesces off of surfaces we couldn't just paint over -- every couple of hours we had to stand in the middle of the room doing the "Ew" dance and chanting "ICan'tBeleivePeopleCanLiveLikeThis" just to maintain our equilibrium in the face of the task.
Every once in a while somebody would say something along the lines of "Isn't this the grossest thing you've ever had to do in your life?"
And I be able to answer them, "Well -- no. Not really."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-22 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-22 04:47 pm (UTC)Amazing Story Sio.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-22 07:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-22 09:18 pm (UTC)You've beat both of my gross-house stories, one of which is only by proxy.
My mother's mother was squirrelly for decades - as in, she squirreled things away. When I knew her it was just boxes and boxes of fabric, newspaper clippings and "finds" from rummage sales, which filled the rooms of her house until the pathways were only a foot wide. (My mom and I inherited this packrat behaviour, luckily to a lesser degree. My aunt labels boxes of old papers for a living (she's an archivist) and I suspect it's her way of dealing with childhood.) As my grandmother got old, her house went from packrattish to gross, but luckily I never saw it. After she died, the two aunts (more distant from me) who cleaned out and sold her house showed us a home video. They were proud of their work but my mom and my close aunt were very angry about their attitude, and the two sets of sisters no longer talk. I still don't quite understand nor do I want to.
My direct cleanup experience may have been grosser than my grandmother's house. I once fell into bed with a friend-of-friends. She was cute and intelligent but was not doing well on the psychiatric front. She depended on me for emotional support for a few months, and a few occasions of apartment-cleaning. There were cigarette packages everywhere, Coke bottles everywhere, combinations of cigarette butts & Coke (both in bottles and spilled on the floor). There were abandoned therapeutic knitting projects and mounds of dirty clothes. She was too depressed to clean, even when I was there to suggest where she could start. The worst was some broken glass and birdseed on the floor (I think a birdfeeder fell or something) that she walked around for months. I found the experience fairly easy to handle from the grossness perspective - I just did practical things to improve the situation, and there was no significant insect population. But emotionally it was really hard to interact with her. I could however tell my mother that I did know what it's like to be in a really gross house like her mother's.
My house is pretty neat and I have a cleaning person come regularly. My job is to architect the methods for organizing information - one or two levels of abstraction up from labelling the boxes. But I'm doing OK, and I can leave a pile of papers unclassified without worrying much about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-23 06:14 am (UTC)I never get tired of hearing that story. Just don't tell the one about the moving clothing ever again please. I have a squick about maggots.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-23 11:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-23 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-22 01:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-22 10:00 pm (UTC)She'd be in her early 30s by now.