This is one of the grossest things that I have personally witnessed, or it is in the top 20 at the least. I was at a coffee shop the other day and I shuttered to think of it, but the thought would not go out, so this is my attempt at an exorcism. Also, stay tuned for the list of the grossest things I've ever done that may very well exceed the level of yuck featured here. I'm no porcelain doll and I know it. For maximum effect please feel free to visualize the words as you read along and don't neglect to conjure the smells described as much as possible.
There was once a time in my younger years when I had a dull summer temp job. My days consisted of working in a non-air-conditioned brick building doing low skill level tasks. The office was almost always empty, as the regular staff had been let out for their annual vacations. As I remember it a very humid and warm year. The job paid minimum wage and was boring enough to make me take up crossword puzzles. One of the few perks was that the people in our building did get were some freebies from a nearby eatery. The way it worked was that building staff had a limited selection of the cheaper food items to choose from. Not more than a small plate worth of food was allowed to be taken during the single break period of a shift. To get the okay the worker showed what they put on their plate to the check-out person along with their ID badge before going back to the office.
On the last day of my temp time in that office and during the hottest part of the summer, I was training my replacement who was a stout woman that was always sweating. I was stuck on a phone call and gave her the signal to take her lunch break without me. She came back with a smile on her face and in the brightest of spirits. Over an hour later we were alone in the office and I saw her sitting on the floor in between some desks. When I went over to see what she was doing I found her untying her shoe. She looked up at me and excitedly motioned for me to lean down near her. I asked what was up, thinking she was trying to sneak in a nap during office hours. I had only met her a few days before but I found her to be a woman of low ambition. The smell of her removed shoe was that of old meat and mold. She then pulled off her knee-high wool sock as she started to exclaim "Guess what I got at lunch?!" I shrugged not knowing where she was going with this but feeling increasingly uncomfortable being alone with her. She took her sock by the toe and shook out a lint covered, smashed item onto the floor. "Well, yesterday I tried to get a muffin, and the b**** at the check out across the street wouldn't let me have it, so I went back today and got one anyway! Do you want some?" She said this as she picked each piece of a compressed and trampled muffin off the floor into her hand to form a pathetic pile while eating the sad morsels eagerly. At that moment I had to mentally register without reacting that there was a woman on the floor eating a stolen, stepped on, sweaty muffin she had stuffed into her sock some time ago and was offering me to join in with her. I didn't want to offend her, as she was obviously a few pennies short of a dollar. I politely declined to say that I had brought my own lunch and eaten it when she had been out.
We finished the day's work without further incident. Upon leaving I made sure that I took anything with my personal information on it so as to prevent my understudy from ever contacting me. To this day I actually don't know what happened to the muffin thief. My temp job ended as scheduled at the end of my shift that day. I never bothered to tell anyone what had happened because I doubted anyone would have believed me. The lessons I took from that experience are that people like her ruin freebies for everyone, never accept or share food with people unless it is prepackaged and that some temp workers are nuts.