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.
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.