Cleaning the House For the Cleaning Lady

I treat myself to very few luxuries in life. For the most part, I dye my own hair with my daughter’s help because I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.  I do go to a salon once a month for a haircut & I maintain a set of acrylic, French-tipped nails.  Right before my wedding day on September 6, 2009, I decided to have a set put on so I’d look bee-u-tee ful for my big day & I’ve been hooked ever since.

Acrylic nails never break, they always look perfect & besides, they make great screwdrivers! I can slice open a UPS box with my thumb-nail instead of searching high & low for a real tool to do the job.  What a deal.

So, there you have it. I treat myself to two luxuries a month; acrylic nail re-basing & a haircut. Whoop-de-doo.

Working full time, raising a teenager, 2 bad dogs, a cockatiel & being a full time wife to my dear husband takes up most of my time so I’ve allowed myself to have a cleaning woman come in twice a month.  I’ve had a cleaning woman working for me for the past 15 years or so & let me tell you something; it is very easy to get used to someone else doing the heavy cleaning.

Of course, it’s necessary to straighten up the house prior to her arrival every other Tuesday morning.  If there’s a ton of junk cluttering up all the surfaces in the house, it can be pretty tough for her to move it all out of the way to do the scrubbing.

So, for the most part, I straighten up the house for her arrival. But I don’t leave it spotless because that’s her job.

After the cleaning lady left my house last week, she wrote me a note to call her, which I did when I got home from work that evening.  She wanted to tell me she couldn’t find cotton sheets for the bed so she made it up with the fleece set instead. It’s June & 90 degrees out, but that’s beside the point I guess.   If we suffer from night sweats due to the incredibly hot sheets, so be it, we will live.  If worse comes to worse, I will change the sheets myself (((((putting back of hand up to eyebrow & batting my eyes here, can you feel it?))))))

One must be very careful not to Tick Off The Cleaning Lady Or Else She May Quit, God Forbid.

She had something else to tell me in addition.  The next cleaning she’d do for me would be her last.  Although she ‘loves’ her job, she doesn’t ‘love’ her job at my house.

What?

After  years of loyal service, she was finished with me? Dumping me like an online dalliance who doesn’t have the chutzpah to call & break up with you, but sends you an email instead?

Well, at least she called me instead of texting or emailing….

So, “What’s the problem?” I ask her.

“Well,” she says, “I leave your house in a bad mood every time I clean it,” was her cryptic response.

I pay the woman $100 to clean 1 floor of living space; a kitchen, a family room, a dining room that is never used, a study, 2 bedrooms & 2 ½ bathrooms.  It normally takes her 2 ½ hours  to do the job, which translates to $40.00 per hour for her time.

Forty dollars an hour.  Gee, in my world, that is a lot of money for very little time. Not that she doesn’t work hard for that 2 ½ hours, she does, but $40 per hour is still a lot of money to pay for unskilled labor.

At first I felt panicked at the thought of not having a cleaning lady anymore.  Holy cow, might that mean that I would have to sweep & mop & vacuum & scrub & dust & scrape??

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I collected my wits about me & asked her if she’d like a raise?

“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t make a difference. “

What?

So, if I paid her fifty dollars an hour to clean my house, that still wasn’t enough?

I suppose what she wants is for me to thoroughly clean my house before she arrives!

Wouldn’t that be convenient?

Then she could sit on the couch & eat bon-bons & pop In a DVD to entertain herself instead of working to make $100.

If she’d like to discuss ‘bad moods’ on the job, boy can I tell her a thing or two about a job that puts me in a bad mood, which I do for way under $40 an hour, never mind $50!  My dear former cleaning lady ought to work at my desk, on a computer program that is so fouled up, it takes 4 different Help-Desks to maintain it! Working in the federal government is sort of like entering The Twilight Zone. What other organization on earth would insist on creating 768 pieces of paperwork to pay a $1.55 bill?  I may spend 2 hours on one invoice, or, $34.55 in expenses to pay $1.55.

Insanity? Uh huh.

So please, let us NOT talk about jobs that put a person in a ‘bad mood.’

Maybe I should quit my loathsome job & become a cleaning lady…..for $50 an hour, which would be a huge pay raise for me.   After all, the only crap I’d have to deal with would be located in the toilet bowls & that job would be finished within 20 minutes.  In my current job, I deal with crap all day, 8 hours a day.

But maybe I don’t understand the Rules of Being a Cleaning Lady….

I thought cleaning ladies cleaned. I thought it was expected they arrive at a less-than-perfect looking living space & actually made it look neater & tidier; I thought, silly me, that that was their job!

Maybe I’ll put an ad in the paper & offer my cleaning services, for $50 an hour, and the ad would read something like this:

For Hire: $50/hr: Cleaning lady.  Please be sure your house is perfectly neat, tidy & clean before I arrive at your doorstep.  I don’t do windows, toilets, counter-tops, floors, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, and I do not load dirty dishes into the dishwasher.  My favorite snacks are Doritos, low-salt peanuts, dark chocolate brownies & Fanta Orange soda.  I prefer romantic comedies on DVD; nothing too deep or serious, please, since I cannot risk being in a bad mood when I leave your home. Serious inquiries only, call 555-2345.

Hmmm. $50 an hour to deal with crap, or under $20 an hour to deal with crap.

I may just have to  trade in my computer for a Swiffer.