Pollock Halls: Cleaners’ confessions

We asked Pollock Hall cleaners about the horrors they’d encountered in the line of duty and found out you’re all disgusting. 

If you were lucky enough to have lived in halls offering a complimentary cleaning service, you will know the dreaded guilt that arrives early at your door once a week with the sound of hoovers and slamming doors.

The guilt that, once again, your room is an odorous tip, and some poor sod will soon be sifting through your dirty privates drunkenly strewn across the one square metre of floor space.

We approached Pollock cleaners about the most revolting student rooms. These are the answers we got.

It’s not that bad is it?

Strange items

“Everyday I’ll pick up at least one used condom off of the floor… find a lot of unused ones lying around as well.”

“Traffic cones and traffic signs all the bloody time.”

Disturbing items

“Once found a whip and a pair of stilettos in a boy’s room in Holland block.”

“Couple of boys once filled the bath up and then shat and pissed in it.”

We asked how they knew it was them.

“I heard them giggling about it in the room across the hall, saying ‘Fuck it the cleaner will deal with it’.

“I wasn’t going to stand for that… so I stormed in, grabbed the main lad by the ear and marched him to the bathroom… told him to have it clean within the hour or else.

“I went in after they’d cleaned it… it was spotless, could eat your dinner of it.”

What made them laugh the most

“At the end of term when the rooms have all been cleared out, we have to go through them double-checking there was nothing left. One time I was going through the bedside draws and I found a tortoise. By this point the guy had already buggered off and had just left his tortoise behind.”

“Couple years back these two idiots thought they’d try keep a hamster in halls. Since we came into the rooms once a week they’d alternate the hamster between their rooms depending on the day. It went on for a good month or two, but I kept finding straw on the floor and one day I corned one of the lassies… she confessed pretty quickly.”

Who is filthiest: girls or boys?

“Girls.”

“Girls.”

“Girls, its all that makeup, it goes everywhere.”

Dirtiest nationality

“Definitely Americans. I’m not even joking when I say that last year we had this American whose room was so bad that you could barely open the door for all the Mcdonald’s and Domino’s boxes.”

One thing they all agreed on was more often then not the weirdest thing in the rooms is the people themselves.

“We used to clean the rooms every day and because of that got to the know the students quite well. These days since we only clean the rooms once a week, it’s not often that we meet the students and when we do half of them can barely make eye contact let alone say ‘good morning’.”

A cleaner’s dream room

So, if you are lucky enough to have a cleaner, maybe next time you see them make a bit more of an effort to say hi.

It might even be in your own best interests as well as courtesy as they have a lot of dirt on all of us.