This cautionary tale is for anyone who reserves hotel rooms for business or pleasure purposes. Since this is a website catering to mainly deaf professionals, many of whom are frequently business travelers, this exposé will make even the most savvy traveler feel queasy in the stomach.

There’s nothing like the feeling of hitting the pillow in your hotel room to catch some winks after a long day. People have been warned about hotels not changing or cleaning the bed linens as often as they should. But there are other things to be concerned about in the room besides busting out the blacklight on the sheets.

From Atlanta, Fox 5 highlighted the questionable practices housekeepers at various chains use to clean those little glasses that sit on the counter in your hotel bathroom. The first of two captioned videos showed housekeepers either rinsing out the glasses with just lukewarm water and placing them back, or spraying the glasses with a blue cleaning solution contained in a bottle clearly marked “Do Not Drink.”

The grossiest offender of these incidents has got to be the one where the housekeeper donned latex cleaning gloves and cleaned out the toliet. After that task was finished, she proceeded to clean out the glasses–wearing the same gloves! To add insult to injury, she then dried out the glasses using a dirty guest towel that was hanging on the rack, which she sniffed to make sure it wasn’t TOO dirty. A top Fulton County, Georgia health inspector commented that these blatant health code violations were systemic, “…almost like a houskeeping school out there, they’re teaching them all the wrong ways to do it.” The reporter that appeared in both videos, Dana Fowle wrote on her blog:

A spokeswoman for Embassy Suites wouldn’t go on camera but let it slip, “Well they only have X amount of time to clean a room and that’s why they do it.” What?!?!?!?! Is she saying management doesn’t allow them time to properly follow county health codes?

If you think you’re immune from these practices because you paid top dollar at an expensive hotel, think again. Four- and five-star hotels are also guilty of these infractions. The second video profiled several high end hotels whose housekeepers cleaned those glasses in a laissez-faire fashion. Several of the travelers who saw the violations were speechless. One of the travelers in the video remarked that herpes, staph infections, and hepatitis are “not supposed to be part of the [hotel] bill, no.” An understatement, if you ask me. Just imagine all the diseases and viruses that are breeding on these glasses! In the video, Fowle stated that the “disease expert says drinking out of these guest room cups and glasses is like being at a restaurant and eating off the last person’s plate.”

And the same expert finished up the train of thought by pointing out:

…and having the waiter come over and say well, here, let me clean that off for you. And taking a towel out of their pocket and pulling that back down on your plate. That’s what it’s like.

The top health inspector concluded by remarking, “I suspect it’s going on in other counties, other states” as well as other hotel chains. So if you’ve been wondering why the water you’ve been drinking from the glasses tastes like it came from the toliet, perhaps it did. Next time I check in, I’m bringing in my own glasses. Because I don’t want the next check out to happen at the local hospital.