“Storing ’Loose’ Soup In The Bottom Clear Vegetable Drawer Of The Fridge, So It’s Just Sloshing Around In There,” And 15 Other Hygiene And Common Sense Disasters
by Benjamin Dzialdowski · BuzzFeedRecently, PessemisticGnome asked r/AskReddit, "What’s the worst case you’ve seen of a grown adult having absolutely no basic knowledge of hygiene, biology, everyday life, etc?" So here are some of the top responses:
1. “I thought I could smell burst cat food at work (pet shop), so I was wandering the aisles trying to find the source of the smell. If you've ever experienced burst tins of pet food that have become maggot-infested, you know it's a very distinct and repulsive smell. Anyway, I finally found the source of the smell. It was not burst cat food, as I had initially suspected; it was my colleague, who was quite averse to hygiene, and had reached new levels of stench.”
2. “My dad refuses to reapply deodorant despite being the sweatiest human I know. He only uses the almond brands that don't do shit, anyway. And he only showers on Sunday ‘to start the work week clean’. I feel bad for his colleagues.”
3. "These stories are both about my step-sister and happened when I was pregnant."
"She was absolutely furious with me when she found out I had gone swimming because she thought I would drown the baby. No amount of explaining the placenta, umbilical cord and amniotic fluid would sink in.
Later on, my shirt crept up a little bit and she was able to see my belly button and noticed it was ‘still closed’ and asked what I needed to do to get it open. She thought the umbilical cord was like a tube that attached the baby to the mother's belly button and you had to feed the baby through that tube.
She is genuinely the dumbest person I know.”
4. “In the time I've lived here, my roommate has told me:"
"Mosquitoes can't get to us because we live on the second floor (next to a body of pretty stagnant water).
The pest control guys should only spray the stairs to keep our yearly ants out.
We need to keep the windows and doors closed to keep the yearly ants (that are clearly coming up through the floor) out.
‘It looks like earthquake weather.’
Throws out functioning ceramic bowls she doesn't want to clean.
Throws out brand-new food gadgets because ‘it didn't come with instructions’ (it did) (and also is literally one step).
Does not know a vacuum needs to be cleaned sometimes; throws them out as soon as the suction gets low.
Bought a rubbish bin with some extra parts for holding the bin bag down. Learned and forgot how to use them multiple times over the course of six months. Threw the rubbish bin out without a replacement, started piling her rubbish on the counter instead.
Throws stuff out as soon as she doesn't want it any more, but does not know what does and doesn't belong to her, so has thrown my stuff out on more than one occasion.
Insists her cat gets cranky if she doesn't get to listen to her lo-fi at least a couple of hours a day. Cat spends most of the day sleeping in a room other than the one playing the lo-fi.
Breaks a waste disposal at least once a year by throwing her coffee grounds in the sink every day. Has repeatedly been told that's what causes it. Continues to do it.
Claims that organising is ‘triggering’ to the point that even if I organise something, she personally becomes entropic and cannot maintain it.
Cannot tell you where she put something she took out of the dishwasher less than five minutes ago. Does not put anything back in the same place twice in a row.
Puts away visibly dirty dishes. Claims to have previously been a Navy dishwasher.
She's 40 years old and has been living independently for at least 10 years off of mostly packaged dinners and chicken nuggets. I tell my family she's the perfect demonstration of evolution: she's not actually good; she's just not bad enough to die young.”
5. “Someone I know barely ever washes their hands, even after going to the toilet or taking the rubbish out, but refuses to touch the buttons in the lift. It's probably better for all of us.”
6. “My nephew doesn't like to brush his teeth and got angry at the dentist for removing the tartar build-up because it was ‘protecting his teeth’."
"He also thought his mum couldn't evict him because squatters' rights legally let him stay in her house, so going to court would be illegal.
He's 24.”
7. “There was a woman at the gym who wore the same workout outfit daily for at least two months, did not launder the clothes and did the StairMaster for an hour daily. Pungent doesn't begin to describe the odor; you could smell her when she walked in the door.”
8. “I used to work in a lab. A co-worker of mine ‘sweated too much in gloves’, so he just opted not to wear them… even when opening and pouring urine samples. He hardly washed his hands. Management knew and never addressed it.”
9. “I dated a guy and one night I asked for his help making dinner by peeling carrots. It was a new peeler. Two carrots in, and he didn’t take the plastic safety cover off and didn’t realise he was doing nothing.”
10. “I had a real nasty dude in my unit in the Army who barely showered or changed his uniform, even after working with fuel systems all day. He got sent out on a field mission one day, and a group of us cleaned his bunk space because we couldn't stand the smell."
"We found containers of half-eaten food, bottles full of dip spit, even bottles of what looked like urine crammed under his bunk against the wall. We were in barracks with a bathroom and rubbish chute not 50 feet away. Some people are just fucking lazy and make it everyone else's problem.”
11. “I once went in a grown man's house with a friend, sat on his couch, thought something felt off. Lifted the cushion and found a pizza box. Opened the pizza box and found an entire meat lover's pie minus one slice. I dragged my friend out of there while he was in the bathroom.”
12. “They would go straight to bed after a gym session because it was 'clean sweat'... I don't know what that means either. My best guess is that, since running outdoors resulted in dirty sweat, dirtiness probably is when there are the sandy particles stuck to the skin.”
13. “Storing soup in the bottom clear vegetable drawer of the fridge. Like, pouring in ‘loose’ soup they made and it's just sloshing around in there.”
14. “At my first place of work, I witnessed the manager shouting at a co-worker because she’d gone to the bathroom to change her pad. He was adamant that she should have ‘held it’ until we were less busy. She said it doesn’t work that way."
"He claimed he knew multiple women who didn’t need pads or tampons because they’d been ‘toilet-trained’ and would hold it. (I assume these women were either on birth control that stops periods or post-menopausal, if they existed at all.) He said my co-worker was just lazy, unhygienic and that her parents had failed to potty-train her when she was a toddler. (Which is, apparently, an age at which he thinks menstruation takes place.)
I also told him that that isn’t how menstruation works. He told me, ‘You’re not a woman, so you don’t know.’ I asked how he knows then, and he was like, ‘I’ve had a lot of girlfriends!’ A claim which I still find rather dubious.”
15. “My ‘forever alone’ adult male friend walks around with food stuck in his untrimmed facial hair and does not take advice well at all.”
16. “One old friend of mine. We went out to London one day. She wore heels, but they started hurting, so she took them off. She just walked around the dirty city of London barefoot all day. (Very lucky not to injure her feet.) At the end of the day, I stayed at hers overnight. She just crawled into bed??? The bottoms of her feet were black all over. She saw no issues with this at all. It was then I realised her dark grey sheets were supposed to be light cream if the sides were anything to go by.”
H/T to PessemisticGnome and r/AskReddit for having the discussion!
Any stories of your own to add? Let us know in the comments below!
Additional thumbnail credits: Daniel Lozano Gonzalez / Getty Images, Channel 4, NBC
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