"Dirty Stories" anyone?

What is the dirtiest, filthiest, smelliest, downright messiest you have ever been in your life? I mean like when you were a kid did you ever dump pain all over you? Have you ever fallen into a garbage bin or a sewer? Been chasing someone on a hoverboard and ran into a truckload of manure? Ever been on an outing where you didnt take a shower for a month?

In college did you ever do a mud fight?

Afterwards how did you clean up and how long did it take?

My little sister and I went out and played in the light, fine dust on a local road-building project. Like talcum powder. We came home completely tan from head to foot.

Mama made us stand on the porch and just hosed us down, clothes and all.

That was the fun experience.

Cleaning out the lacquer vat in a transformer kiln…not so much fun. I was tasting the stuff for days and days.

That pretty much describes my current situation.

Years ago I was helping my then bf sand a recently built wall in his mother’s basement. It was hot so he brought a fan in the room.
A little bit later I heard him laughing and he told me, “Don’t look in the mirror”.
I was covered with a fine white powder from the part of my hair to my toes.

The worst though was when I had gone horseback riding at one of those places where you pay by the hour. That day I was riding Lucky - whose full name was ‘Lucky if You Can Stay on Him’ - a very handy horse who knew every trick in the book to get a rider off.
He threw me into a swampy dried up pond. I was stuck in mud up past my waist, couldn’t move at all. I had to wait until some other riders came though and pulled me out.
I was covered in thick gooey mud.
When I got home I should have hosed off but I didn’t.
I had to wash my jeans and jeans jacket seven times to get all the mud out.

When I was about 12 I was visiting a friend’s relative’s farm and we spent one afternoon riding a go-kart through their fields, which were home to a couple dozen head of cattle. Trying to avoid giant rooster tails of cow poop somehow made riding the go-kart more fun. We were terrible at avoiding the bovine land mines, and were quite disgusting by the end of the day.

When I was in my 20’s, I spent a spring break rebuilding an ancient power steering assembly and tracking down the resulting leaks. I bathed in ATF fluid. Of all the substances a car has puked onto me, that was the hardest to be finally rid of. It penetrated my head and body hair, then repelled any detergent I used to try to get rid of it. I could still smell it on myself weeks later.

Back in college, my fraternity went out to Cochituate state park for a day. We played a brutal game of tackle football on a wet, muddy field. About halfway through we realized that mixed in with the mud was copious amounts of goose shit. By then it didn’t matter, so we just finished the game, then we all dove into the lake to rinse off.

Two times pop to my mind.

The first was when I was in the field portion of survival school up in the mountains. Running around, not showering, eating like crap (I lost about 14 pounds) made me gross. The fact that there were 3 feet of snow on the ground just meant I was cold the entire time. Once we finally got to base I took a 30 minute shower.

This next one wasn’t really dirt, per se, I just felt gross. I’m from the desert. I like the desert. I’m perfectly fine to walk around in 105+ degree weather. After Baghdad dry heat doesn’t bother me. But once I went to Georgia. In July.

Fuck my life I was miserable. I have never sweat so much in my life. It was literally dripping down my face. My flightsuit was soaked.

During college summers I used to roughneck oil rigs. One time during an unusual, high pressure job a few smaller pieces of equipment fell down below the substructure and into the cylindrical pit below the BOP where the casing started. It was full of every fluid that came off a rig floor; diesel, WooleyBooger, grease, drilling muds, etc. I stripped down and jumped in, found the stuff with my toes and got everything out. I was new at the time but my driller said “You’re hired… forever!”

On an Outward Bound ski mountaineering trip we cross country skied, built snow dens and igloos, climbed up Mt. Massive and came down the far side. That took about 8 days w/o a shower. Despite the occasional wipedown with snow I imagine we were pretty freaking ripe.

I thought there was nothing but then I remembered one hot sticky day in Michigan when my young friend and I were fascinated by the tar on the pavement. It was soooo hot that the tar had turned tacky, and we decided it was something fun to play with.

Tar does not come off skin easily, and it does not come off clothes at all.

I might be a contender in this thread. I worked as a road service mechanic for may years. Once or twice a year I would get stuck with a call where some old greasy truck was broke don in the mud and I might have to spend 4 or 5 hours rolling aound in mud and grease. It goes right through the clothes into the skin.

Trying to catch a bucket of paint I have been covered in wet latex paint thank god.

The very worst, I had to work under these giant D&I metal presses when the scrap conveyor would break down, sometimes several days in a row I would have metal shavings and water soluable oil raining down on me.

Good lord, I may have actually witnessed you doing that.

Ladies and gents, we have a winner. That stuff is horrendous.

I spend a lot of time working on old/classic cars as well as having taken part in a couple of cross-country ‘muddy’ type runs, so I’m no stranger to getting properly filthy. There have been times when I’ve had to be hosed down before I could enter the house.

Three stories stand out though:

1 - I was doing some renovation work on an old building a few years ago, part of which involved pulling down the old ceiling. The ceiling was probably around a hundred years old, and we did find an old cigarette packet from 1930 or so in the rubble. We just put on masks and goggles and went at it with crowbars - within a minute the room was so dusty we couldn’t see more than a metre in front of us, so you can imagine how filthy we all got.
As it was just a couple of miles away from home I walked there and back again - but I wasn’t counting on getting so filthy, and of course there was no running water there. So I ended up walking two miles home, through busyish streets, covered head to toe in century old plaster and dust. You can just imagine the sort of looks I got. It was only when I got home and looked in the mirror that I realised that with the clean(ish) bits where the mask and goggles had been, I looked like either a surprised panda or something very racist. :eek:
Also (and this may be TMI), in spite of the mask, I had black snot for about two days afterwards.

2 - I had a job doing valeting & detailing on cars. One day, an elderly Jaguar came to me from a dealer, with instructions to ‘remove tobacco stains from roof lining’. That’s a messy job at the best of times, but when I saw this one I was gobsmacked - the (previously light grey) lining was stained, front to back, to a swirly chocolate colour. :dubious: I ended up spending about five hours with various cleaning chemicals, lots of water and some stiff brushes to get it all out. I had nicotine-tainted water running down my arms, into my shirt, down to my waistband. It took me an hour in the shower afterwards to get myself clean enough afterwards. It was disgusting. :frowning: On top of that, I felt fairly sick that night, so I think I managed to give myself nicotine poisoning through my skin. :eek:
I did get a £50 bonus from the dealer for doing the job, though.

3 - Working on an old car of mine, I was trying to get all the old underseal off from the underside of the chassis. The best way to get it off was a combination of heat gun, scraper and white spirits, so I climbed under the car and got to work (notice how all these stories involve me being right underneath the dirty thing?). The white spirits were dissolving the underseal nicely, but then it all dripped down onto me. Including my hair. Which then solidified again.
When I got home, I had to have a shower to get the worst off, then a bath to soak all the really stubborn stuff off, then another shower to clean the oily slick off myself. Then I had to spend twenty minutes cleaning the bath again. Despite all that, I was still picking small bits of tar out of my hair for a week afterwards.

Texturing a ceiling sucks.

How did you shower that stuff off? I’d think it would clog any shower drain.

Humidity be a bitch, don’t she? About a hour of medium effort yard work means a baseball hat so completely saturated with sweat that it is dripping from the bill. Add to that the dirt/dust/clippings from the work being done and one is properly filthy.

Working a pea combine for Del Monte. Second in command decided he wanted to run my machine (which was a new design). We’ll call him Bruce ('cause that was his name).

He ran it too fast, and completely filled it with vines so that the drum stopped turning. It then became my job to crawl inside it with a hook knife to unjam plant matter from the beater bars.

Completely soaked in plant juice - jeans, long-sleeve shirt.

I liked Bruce anyway - since he introduced me to vodka gimlets, which he would bring out to the field in his water jug.

Probably after going caving. One cave was accessed under a big boulder where a stream flowed out of a hillside. You had to dive underwater under the boulder and pop out on the other side inside the cave. And because it had an active stream running through it, much of the cave was muddy. We became very wet, tired, and muddy.

I once helped muck out a sheep shed where the sheep had been penned all winter. That stuff was deep. However, it was pretty dry so aside from dust didn’t get on us too much.

I’ve backpacked in the jungle for days at a time without being able to bathe. That gets pretty ripe.

I’ve gone caving, and gotten covered in mud from head to foot. I’ve also had to dig a number of vehicles out of the mud, which produced much the same result.

Can’t compete with most of these. The closest would be a job I was running while deployed to Guam. I’m pretty sure that ‘Guam’ translates to ‘sweat’. The fucking place is just miserable for a boy raised in Alaska.

Anyway, Vietnam was muggy and nasty, but it was generally just sweat to sluice off. The job on Guam was up at the Naval Magazine on top of a mountain made of coral. It consisted of digging a five mile trench around the entire facility and putting up a new security fence. Pick and shovel just doesn’t work with coral, so it was ten hours a day of taking turns with a 90 pound jackhammer, and there was zero shade. The coral dust is abrasive and gets into every pore, into your nose, ears, butt crack, etc. Day in and day out for 2-3 months on that godforsaken hill, and other than RVN, I was never so glad to leave a place.

When I was little my dad dug a hole for us to swim in. There’s a few pictures of me in nothing but a pair of shorts and mud, head-to-toe.

I’ve stayed fairly clean since. Compared to the rest of y’all :wink: