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You never really know what you’ll be greeted with when you visit other people’s homes. Will it be sparkling clean, not one ordinary thing out of place? Or will the house be cluttered with the strangest things imaginable, like shrines for the US presidents and collections of creepy Santas?
These workers, whose job requires them to go into strangers’ homes, have been sharing their experiences with the latter, and boy oh boy, does it get bizarre. To find out just how odd these people’s experiences were, all you have to do is scroll down!
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#1
As a Domino's delivery guy, you're not supposed to go inside people's houses, but often times feel pressured to by people, especially elderly or handicapped people who have difficulty going to the door. This one man was in a house the size of my bedroom, and unable to get out of his chair. So I helped myself in when I saw this man with one leg struggling to even leave his chair. After setting his pizza down, he reached for his wallet and I noticed how severe his hands were trembling. He asked me to pull out enough money for the food. I'll never forget the shame on his face, he was not old but clearly struggling, and very uncomfortable with his disability. I tried to act like it wasn't a big deal, and he mentioned that he'd had an accident on the job that cost him his leg and some motor functions. My heart was on the floor when I left. I usually spent all my tips on beer back then, but I put half of what I had made that day in his mailbox. I doubt it was that much of a blessing, but he blessed mine by leaving an impression on me. Whenever I feel sorry for myself I think of that lonely man, and how good I really have it.
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#2
I used to be a cable guy. I saw some weird stuff. There is one house that I'll never forget though. The house had an unfinished basement with just a cement floor. I walk down the stairs and there is a Pit Bull that is chained up to a steel support pole in the middle of the basement. It was deathly skinny. There were so many piles of dog s**t lying on the cement floor I could hardly make a step without stepping in it. It obviously reeked of dog s**t and urine. I walked back upstairs, told the customer that I refuse to work in that environment and went back to my truck and left.
Edit: Yes. I called the local police department to report animal abuse. I have 3 dogs myself. It made me sick.
#3
When I was delivering Pizzas in High School I delivered to a house and knocked on the door. When the door opened I was staring at my estranged father whom I haven't seen in like 10 years. He was drunk, didn't recognize me, shortchanged me, and didn't tip.
#4
I deliver pizza and one time I was delivering to this house, and out of the corner of my eye, I see a ring tailed lemur. Just sitting on the floor. And it really caught me off guard and I stopped what I was saying and said "is that a lemur?" And the guy was super casual about it and let me pet it, snap some pictures, and gave me an extra tip because I knew it was a lemur. I got back to the store and told everyone and they were like "Oh that guy? He has a kangaroo too."
Pics of lemur:
http://imgur.com/vYw8e1q
http://imgur.com/8i1xpQq.
#5
I installed central vacuuming for a while, boss told me some stories:
- He found over $10,000 cash in some old lady's wall. Now he is an honest guy so of course he wanted to return it, but he didn't want to give her a heart attack, so he breaks the news gently, turns out she knew because her late husband used to leave s**t like that around the house, but she didn't remember where it was.
- It is always christmas at some person's house. ALWAYS. They have a 24/7/365 christmas room.
- Bunkers and stockpiles of food. So many of those. They always pay cash.
#6
I was an aide for a state politician. She was doing a constituent visit pertaining to an upcoming bill, and liked to have someone with her just in case. The guy ran a reptile rescue operation (mostly concerned with exotic pets that escaped/were abandoned), and his entire basement was outfitted with small reptile habitats for temporary storage. He had pools with small crocodiles, a few of those massive pythons that are so often used in conservation public outreach stuff, and even a little workbench where he repaired the shells of turtles that had been hit by cars.
#7
I had a very brief stint as a salesperson with a company that sells & installs solar panels. House calls were a fairly common part of it. Usually they were as dull as dishwater, but this one time...
So I'm sent on a call to this old guy's home. I get there and it's fine (other than him greeting me with "isn't this more of a man's job?"). We go in to discuss plans etc. His house is freezing. He goes and hops into his bed. Which is in the living room. In fact other than a radio (which doesn't look like it works) it's the only furniture in the room. He invites me to sit down (literally pats the bed next to him), but I elect to stay standing. So I'm doing my spiel standing up, he asks me if I'd get him a glass of water. I go to the kitchen, and find out why it's so cold - neither his fridge, nor this massive freezer, have doors. Also they're filled with chickens, and little else. The bin is filled - filled - with chicken bones. Plus when he said "glass of water" he actually meant "old empty milk bottle of water", as there were no glasses, or cups.
I take him his water, and feeling uncomfortable awkwardly joke about him really liking chicken. He starts telling me the best way to boil them. Best I can gather his diet consists exclusively of breakfast cereal and boiled chicken.
Anyway, he buys solar panels. I've decided to sign him up for a special plan I could offer to seniors who were struggling financially. Before I go though he insists on checking my bag as I leave, to make sure I haven't stolen anything (?!).
Few weeks later I'm chatting with a friend who works in a bank in the area, and I mention my interesting customer. They reveal he's actually rich as sin, a fortune amassed over a life time of living a profoundly miserly existence, and being a thoroughly brutal businessman.
tl;dr I sold solar panels to a guy who Ebenezer Scrooge would tell to tone it down.
#8
I work at a psychiatric hospital, and am sometimes required to join my patients to visit their home for many purposes, like retrieving documents.
This one time I joined a patient of mine and went to visit his old house with him. This guy was a professor in geography and was incredibly intelligent, but was, unfortunately for him, also prone to schizofrenia.
Severely so.
Once we arrived, he unlocked the door and we stepped in, only for me to lay my eyes on the most amazing house I have ever seen in my entire life. This man, in his psychosis, wheeled in hundreds and hundreds of wheelbarrows full of sand, thus transforming his house, living room, bedroom, bathroom and everything, into a dune landscape. For the trees he used old christmas trees (you know, the plastic fake ones), and scattered here and there between the trees stood a toaster, oven, a table and some chairs.
I looked through this house in amazement, and finally this man walks up to me and says: "You like it, don't you? I can tell."
PS: English is not my native language, apologies for any flaws in my use of it.
#9
Working voluntarily as a paramedic, you see a lot of strange stuff.
But the things that stick with me the most are those little details: photographs, memorabilia and all that. It's not so much crazy but more kind of making you think about your own life, especially when you come to a house/appartment and know that the person inside might leave it with you for the last time. You just hope that you can live such a fulfilled live as they have and that you have equally beautiful memories that last for another lifetime - just telling from some photos on their nightstand.
#10
About 70% of my customers are elderly retired. Went into one 96yo's house and found a shrine -- a for-real shrine -- to Ronald Regan. Not as an actor, but as a politician. I mean, she digs the dude.
#11
If you hire a mover to pack and move your house, we will find,have to pick up, and potentially chase each other with your dirty pictures and s*x toys, if you're dumb enough to leave them loose in your closet and drawers.
#12
Done a lot of canvassing for political campaigns-- never seen anything too crazy but there are an alarming number of people out there who think nothing of answering the door in their underwear.
A lot of it is just sad. I worked in a poor rural district one season and you learn pretty quickly not to turn back just because the house looks abandoned-- there's probably an old lady in there who doesn't have the mobility to keep the house in good shape, and she'll want to talk your ear off. If you're out during the day you can see the scale of unemployment-- lots of people at home. You can see their age on the voter roll which drives home just how rough people are living. Lots of hoarders, lots of abused-looking dogs t*****p in the yard. I once canvassed a house where I had to step around a house cat to get up to the porch. It looked like it had been there a while.
It's not like every single person in that area was living in a pit of despair; I talked to plenty of regular middle-class people too. But it's hard to appreciate the desperation that exists in some parts of the US until you get on the back roads and start walking around. It's also shows what an uphill battle it is to win political change-- I was only talking to people who are registered to vote, but even among those many don't actually go to the polls, or even know who's running.
#13
Actually today I saw something that made me laugh. Im a postman so didnt go inside, but as I was walking up to the house, I could see through the window.
There was a guy riding a mobility scooter in the living room on his own, he was riding it in a circle waving his arm above his head as if he was waving a lasso about, it was quite awkward when he saw me and looked pretty embarrassed.
#14
I used to work as an EMT, there's a lot of people out there living in pretty putrid conditions. You can't necessarily tell which house is going to be bad just based on the outside. One of the craziest (for health reasons) ones that I ever saw was a normal enough looking house that had the grandfather essentially living in the garage. He was confined to a wheelchair and needed an O2 tank, we were there were a call for difficulty breathing. The entire place was COVERED in ashtrays, ashes, and cigarette butts. It reeked of urine too, I remember taking the man's blood pressure on the scene and trying not to gag. Very sad.
#15
Did floor work for a while, putting down carpets or tearing everything up for tile work, new hard wood floor, etc. Usually the houses we worked in were emptied for us the previous day by some movers, but not this time.
We walked in and instantly smelled something horrible. All the furniture was still there, pizza and spaghetti were spoiling in the fridge, and in one of the bedrooms there was a hospital bed-ish set up that was entirely stained orange and brown. And not only was furniture still everywhere, but everything was everywhere. I could list the possessions, but most of it was broken kids toys and just random s**t. The basement had a broken PS3 (or at least outwardly damaged), an Xbox 360, and a few Nintendo DS's, plus a few shelves of, what I assume were (never played), D&D books of some kind. We were, admittedly, nosey. Most of this stuff was buried under wet piles of clothes and seriously just bunches of kids toys, plastic guitars and action figures and dolls. There were still pictures of the family on the fridge, plus generic kids drawings from school or whatever.
In the creepy room with the hospital bed, one of us got a little extra nosy and started looking through drawers. What looked like a normal dresser, like for clothes and s**t, had 3 pistols in the top drawer (off the top of my head, I only remember one of them being a Beretta of some kind) and the rest of the drawers were filled with boxes of ammunition.
We called our boss and told him the house had not been cleaned at all, and we weren't sure what to do, and also we had found some guns and were wondering if the guy had been a police officer, since there were badges with the guns in the top drawer (we weren't really sure what the badges were for, but we knew our boss had known this guy and his family personally). He told us he was not a police officer, and the story of the place was that the whole family, minus the father, had left with the mom to live with the grandparents because the father had met a girl online and planned to leave them, which ended up happening.
It's not really super crazy, the guy probably just owned guns and a bunch of ammunition, used it recreationally and all. It was just so weird to us that he had left it behind, and, honestly, I could have described this house for paragraphs. It was something straight out of one of those hoarders shows, and it was just super creepy because it was a very rainy, cloudy morning. The kid's bikes were still there, four lawn mowers were in the garage, spray painted police baton hung on one of the walls. Just a very odd place at the time.
We ended up cleaning the house and ripping out the carpets, boss came by and took the guns and ammo.
#16
My dad is a firefighter, and the call was for someone who couldn't get up out of his chair. It was a 400 pound guy with a huge ketchup stain on his chest with crumbs in it. Low and behold, there's a empty bucket of KFC chicken next to the chair. The dude was so lazy he squirted ketchup on his chest and dipped the chicken in it.
#17
I was a teenager and worked for a rent to own place. I wish I could say the number of times I did tech support on electronics that couldn't work because too many roaches were living in them, but the best was walking in to a trailer and finding a redneck spooning a large pig on a couch. We're talking like 200+ pound pig.
#18
My moms a real estate agent and she told me the craziest thing shes ever seen is a toilet in the middle of a living room, connected. No sink, no shower. Just a toilet.
#19
Visted a very odd man a few weeks ago to discuss his rent arrears. His wife has passed away a few weeks earlier. He proudly pointed out the large photo of her on the wall in his hallway.
The photo was of her, passed, in her hospital bed. It was taken from a really creepy angle too. Like he'd taken it the picture whilst resting the camera on her chest. Didn't hang around for very long after I'd seen that to be honest.
#20
Cockroaches crawling all over an obese lady's diabeetus foot; don't think she could tell they were there.
#21
As a carpenter I went to install a cabinet at a woman's house. She had a glass jar of blackheads.
#22
Not in but outside a customer's home was a very large trash bin with the words "no raccoons" spray painted on it.
#23
As a medic, I responded to a call for a fall at the home a of a 70 something year old female. I opened the door to find the living room full of hooks, suspended from the ceiling, and on said hooks were hanging all of her possessions. Meanwhile, she's been laying on the floor for 3 days, in her own urine. Poor thing.
Literally...all of her clothes and jewelry hanging from hooks on the cieling. It was super bizarre.
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