As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I spent many a high school and college summer toiling behind the counter at Dairy Queen. But my particular DQ was a walk-up stand which meant no public restroom. And for this, so many years later, I am now very, very glad.

See, over at Reddit, what started as one person’s story of the horrors of working in the game room at Chuck E. Cheese’s has quickly turned into a collection of readers’ tales about… god help me for writing this… poop-smeared bathrooms.

Writes one commenter:

This is really common actually. I worked at Barnes and Noble and someone smeared shit all over the handicapped stall. Walls, ceiling, behind the toilet in places you could only get shit if you were actively smearing it with your hands. It is bizarre what some people do. What could possibly prompt people to smear their own shit all over the place at a business like Chuck-e-cheese or Barnes and noble?

Followed by:
“Yup, this happened when I worked at Target back around 1999.”
“I can confirm this happened when I worked at Starbucks in 2008 as well.”
“Happened at the Starbucks I worked at in 06, they wrote Dunkin on the wall with it.”
And our personal favorite:
“I was just at Buffalo Wild Wings last weekend. Happened there too, but they included footprints. The footprints weren’t in the shit though. It was like someone smeared shit on their shoe for the sole purpose of creating footprints.”

Since we know that many of you work or have worked in retailers and restaurants, we wanted to know just how common this is. Tell us in the comments — though, please, try to be as tactful as possible, which might be difficult given the nature of the topic.

And if you’ve ever worked in a store or restaurant with a public restroom, here’s a poll for you:

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