People who go in other people's houses regularly, what horrors have you seen?

When I was young, I did house clearances for the council. If a council house became vacant for whatever reason, our job was to clear it out, to get rid of the furniture and the debris. After us, a cleaning crew would come in, and then, when it was spick and span, it would be passed on to a new tenant. It was a cushy job for a teenager. I was a driver's mate. I loved it. My duties were: to relax in the passenger seat of a 7.5 tonne lorry; to smoke weed with the Jamaican dude (Lewie) who drove the lorry; and to occasionally smash up some furniture with a sledgehammer and load it onto the back of the lorry. Most days were chill. We'd listen to reggae and Lewie would educate me about various soundsystems. Lewie would pick me up every day at 5:30am, in his burgundy e36 (I think?) AMG Mercedes. Beautiful car. The best part of the day was taking a ride in that low-slung car, streaking through the streets of North London, with no traffic, listening to that incredible engine purr. Anyway. Every morning we would arrive at the depot at 6am, and we would be given our list of jobs for the day. These would take the form of printouts of emails. Each email would have a description of the job, and a few photos, as well as a map. One day, we're given one single job, which was unusual. The photos have been deleted from the printouts, which was unheard-of. The people working in the depot seemed incredibly apologetic and pitying when they handed the papers over to us. Something was up. We arrived at the job; it was somewhere near Portsmouth IIRC. The resident had died, which is why the flat needed to be cleared out. From chatting to the other residents of the housing block, we learned that he was a notorious alcoholic. When he came into the local pub, he stank so much everyone would move to the other side of the room, apparently. The flat was covered, on every square foot, by a knee-deep layer of rubbish. Imagine a tip; that's what it looked like. We had to literally wade through it. I'm not exaggerating. There was a single mattress lying on the floor in one room. There wasn't much rubbish on the mattress itself, but of course no duvet or sheets or pillows. It was the only clear patch of floor. The kitchen was a war zone, and had clearly not been used in years. There were rats running around everywhere. So we started shovelling. We used the recycling bins; we'd fill them up with crap, then carry them downstairs and load them onto the lorry. They would drip, but we had no better option. Now is the point where you need to stop reading if you're squeamish. I mean it. The bathroom was interesting. The toilet itself had a mound of shit on top of it; a literal pile of human shit, which extended a good foot or so above the rim of the toilet. I found myself literally shovelling human shit (for minimum wage!). After a bit of digging, I hit something hard. It was the toilet seat! This gentleman had clearly blocked the toilet somehow, but continued to shit in it, without flushing. After a while, the shit had piled up quite high. His ingenious solution was to shut the toilet lid, and then keep on shitting right on top of it. There were rolled-up pairs of jeans on the floor of the bathroom. It was odd, and suspicious. About 7 pairs of jeans, rolled up into little burritos, lying on the floor of the bathroom. I tried to pry them off the floor with my shovel. They were stuck to the floor, weirdly. One of them burst; human shit flew everywhere. It turns out that this debonair had been shitting into pairs of jeans, rolling them up, putting them on the floor of the bathroom, and then (presumably, but not confirmed) pissing on them, so that they became stuck to the floor. "But where did our hero piss, when his toilet was out of order?" I hear you ask. Well, dear reader, as we cleared out the mounds of rubbish, we encountered containers. Water bottles filled with piss. But those were blessings. Once he ran out of water bottles, he would piss in open containers. Empty cans of tuna, full of piss, lined every radiator. *Can you imagine the fucking smell?* Also - and this is something I learned that day - if you leave an open container of piss lying around in your house, it attracts flies. So each empty tuna can had a few dead flies floating in it. Once he ran out of tuna cans, he moved on to empty crisp packets (!!!!!!). As we shovelled out the rubbish, we would encounter empty crisp packets full of liquid and dead flies. They would spill, of course, and then the contents would mix into the general mound of rubbish. This was all happening in a shared building - a small block of about 8 flats. The other residents were *livid*. I distinctly remember one of the residents approaching us, with a crying baby in her arms, complaining about the god-forsaken smell. The baby was crying because the smell was so abhorrent. We were agitating the filth, and it didn't make a pleasant smell. We just advised them to leave the building for a couple of days if they could. We had a young Somalian lad called Mo working with us. Near the end of the first day, I was carrying a bin-load of crap down the stairs (the flat was on the first floor). I encountered Mo in the stairwell. He was leaning against the wall, staring into space, clearly rethinking every decision he had made in his entire life up to that point. He left at the end of that first day, and we never saw him again. From the second day onwards, we were given goggles, masks, "hazmat suits" (paper-thin and completely useless), etc. It took us three days to clear it all out. On the fourth day, a professional cleaner came along and essentially flooded the entire flat with bleach. He was a stoic motherfucker, I think he was called Mike, but even he was a bit perturbed by it all. Those three days deeply changed me as a person. My "disgust threshold" is permanently increased. There's almost nothing that disturbs me any more. When I work in boring office jobs, I'm profoundly grateful.