In this thread, a fairly innocuous thead asking how people’s kids have embarrased them in public settings, we have AngryIrishLass’s kid flinging a diaper onto a McDonalds playground slide.
OK, that’s kind of funny. What isn’t is that she saw fit to let a minimum wage kid clean it up. She left it there and god knows how many other peoples’ kids enjoy the shit slide.
What would possess someone to not take 2 minutes to retrieve the diaper and dispose of it, and do a bit of cleaning up?
The rudeness displayed by you is appalling. You can’t be bothered to take 2 minutes out of your precious day to clean up a diaper mess? And you leave it there and flee the mcdonalds, leaving others to slide down that thing?
Does she carry cleaning/janitorial gear around with her? No. On the other hand, McDonald’s could get somebody there with the correct gear within minutes. And legally, McDonald’s would probably insist on that anyway rather than have a customer do it, no matter how well intentioned.
And it wasn’t like AngryIrishLass was enjoying the situation or laughing at the employee.
Poor rant.
I give it one star.
She doesn’t need a fucking janitorial outfit and specialized equipment to retrieve the diaper and wipe down the slide. Good god. Just get the diaper and wipe down the fucking slide. How difficult is that?
Have you seen the McDonalds playground thingies? They’re a mess of tubes and bubbles and things that kids crawl through. Like this. This part: “way up in the nether region of the thing” makes me think that’s what she was dealing with.
I’m sure if it had been on an accessible slide or something she would have cleaned it up, but I’m not sure she should try to crawl through a child-sized maze of tubes to get to the mess, with two young kids under her supervision.
Obviously not a good situation for anyone, but I’m not sure what she could have done better other than maybe explain the problem to the manager on duty and offer to tip whoever had to deal with it appropriately.
If we’re going to play the game where a specialized hazmat team is needed to clean up the waste, at least alert the McDonalds homeland security team that a biological attack has happened, instead of fleeing.
Why weren’t the other children ordered to go retrieve the thing and give the slide a wipe? Sure, they may not have gotten it spotless, and then she should tell the staff that there was a clean up needed, but it would be a start.
Sure, maybe she couldn’t get up there, but I doubt it. I’m 230 pounds and as flexible as a nail, but I can get up around in there if need be. I don’t do it for fun, but I’ve done it when my kid got herself stuck and scared.
Please. If she didn’t have baby wipes in her bag, she’s an idiot. And every restaurant has a spray bottle of bleach solution laying around somewhere she could ask to use. This is her own child’s shit - it’s less dangerous to her, bacterially, then to anyone else (assuming she shares the child’s intestinal fauna through close proximity). I clean up shit a dozen times a week with no ill effects. You clean it up, you disinfect, and you go wash your hands.
What’s really gross is other children sliding through that same shit, and probably putting their hands in their mouths afterward.
Thank you for the picture of said slides, Renee. Assuming she could not get in there herself, and I’d at least have tried if I were her, she should have at least alerted someone to this instead of letting kids slide down the shit tube.
Sounds to me like she rushed everyone out of there and let the minimum wage kid clean it up while other parents let their kids slide down this thing. Sorry I find this rude.
Basic Human Decency=Cleaning up your own spawns shit wherever they leave it. Even if it means borrowing cleaning supplies and climbing Mt. Motherfucker of a slide. Is this really that hard to understand?
Actually, I can’t believe I’m defending her, because the first reaction I had to that post was revulsion, but I did want to clarify that we weren’t talking about an old-school playground slide here. I also think it was rude and the wrong thing to do, but we don’t know all the details of the situation so I’m willing to give her some benefit of the doubt.
Look, if I were confronted with this - and we’re not talking about a mere skidmark here, but the entire emptied contents of a kid’s colon down the length of a slide, then a baby wipe isn’t going to cut it.
Then make that slide twelve feet up through a maze of kid-sized tubes, and even with the best of intentions, I’d have serious trouble even getting in there.
Also, having cleaned for a living, I can tell you that baby crap would barely register on the grossness scale. Try cleaning out the toilets of a 24 hour pub and nightclub in a rough suburb. Shit with broken glass, condoms, and needles in it. Every. Single. Day. Some poo up a slide wouldn’t rate a mention.
Let’s see here. The thread was about getting embarrassed. AngryIrish got embarrassed. So embarrassed she couldn’t face it and got guilty about it afterwards.
“poor employee”… “hazard pay”… She feels bad, and, um, embarrassed about it.
The more I think about this, the more it’s pissing me off. IF the area was inaccessible, then WTF was her toddler doing playing in there? What if the kid fell and hurt himself? How would she get to him if he broke his little arm? You don’t let your kid play unsupervised, and at that age (diaper wearing age, whatever that was) if you can’t physically get your hands on 'em within about 10 seconds, they’re not being supervised.
So we have two options here - either she could get up there and didn’t, or she couldn’t get in there and so her kid shouldn’t have been in there. Neither one speaks well of her parenting choices.
No, my sympathy comes from a place of having made some spectacularly stupid parenting choices of my own. But there’s no “benefit-of-the-doubt” that this might have been anything other than a stupid, rude and physically dangerous thing to do.
TheLoadedDog, I appreciate your viewpoint on cleaning and its hazards, but these teenaged kids manning the counter at McDonald’s were not hired or trained to clean toilets in a pub. They’re trained to drop fries and push buttons. And this mother wasn’t facing broken glass, condoms or needles (I hope). She was running away from her own child’s easy to clean biological waste out of embarrassment. I understand that it was embarrassing, I get that. In retrospect, it would have even made a funny little anecdote, had it ended with, “…and so there I was, my fat ass to the ceiling, trying to get through those godawful tubes with a spray bottle of bleach and a rag that smelled like french fries!”
Actually, the kids at McDonald’s are paid to clean toilets. Not in a pub, but in an … ahem… “family restaurant”. The broken glass and needles might not be there, but the dozens of shitting kids per day are, and as a parent, you’d understand that little ones have some rather creative ways of defecating.
Me too. I also wonder if people over a certain weight are allowed in the things. I haven’t looked, but I’d be there is a sign somewhere saying “no adults allowed” for insurance purposes, if nothing else. And while I’m relatively small, young, and flexible, and could pretty easily navigate one of the things, I’d bet there are lots of adults who couldn’t.
I also wonder if McDonald’s has a full time janitor on duty.
DUDE, IT’S HER FUCKING CHILD! Yeah, I think she should well think of her own fucking child, that’s rather what parenthood is all about!
Just because you like to mock the phrase doesn’t mean it’s always inappropriate. I’m not making an emotional appeal, I’m using it very literally: parents should think of their children and their physical safety. And while they’re at a public playground, they should also think of the other children, and try to minimize the spread of dysentery and e.coli.
You fuck off. And here’s a baby wipe to clean up after yourself.
