In which my cleaning lady breaks bad on my white sofa but it's sort of my fault

I hired Esperanza, she who did laundry and cleaned windows, and things went well for a while.

I recommended her to my friends.

My friends liked her at first.

Then there were problems. Big problems.

Esperanza let my friend Holly's dog out, despite being told repeatedly that she had to latch the gate when she came in and keep the door closed. The dog got out, the dog got out, the dog got out - and finally, the dog was hit by a car. And died.

Which was bad enough, but Holly didn't fire Esperanza (it is very hard to find someone good help), who then left the door open and the cat got out. The cat was not killed, but that was when Holly decided ya basta. Esperanza had to go.

I should have fired Esperanza in solidarity. I would have gotten major friend credits (I fired my maid because she was a bad maid for you!) and my sofa would not have been destroyed.

My sofa. One of my first adult furniture purchases. I bought it at an estate sale in Houston. It needed re-upholstering but a person who is buying used furniture is probably not in a position to be paying for such fancy stuff. An old white sofa with great solid 1920's bones - I could throw a blanket over it and it would be fine.

For many years, it served me well. When I went to the Peace Corps, my friends Eric and Nancy stored it in their house after warning me that they had three cats who loved to claw on furniture.

"It needs re-upholstering anyhow," I shrugged.

True to the promise, the cats made short work of the sofa. When I moved to Miami, I discovered the wonder of little old Cuban men who worked in their garage and did great work for low prices. I found fabric remnants and a Little Old Cuban Guy (I also found a LOCG for my washer and dryer and for shoe repair - oh, how I miss Miami, home of the LOCG) who picked up the sofa from my house and then returned it a week later, looking almost new.

Then, when my employer told me my services were needed in another city, or, put another way, that my paycheck would now be delivered to Another City and that was where I could pick it up. The movers put a two-inch tear in the upholstery.

Hardly a big deal, but their insurance paid for the sofa to be re-upholstered yet again. This time, I got fancier and got much nicer fabric because well - because someone else was paying for it and that's just human nature. The sky's the limit when it's someone else's checkbook is my motto.

When my mother found out that I had picked white fabric (with a subtle jacquard weave of red and gold), she sighed and said, "I'm never going to be a grandmother, am I?"

Nope. Never really cared about having kids.

The new upholsterer had some tricks that even the LOCG didn't have and did things with the springs and the cushions that made the sofa comfortable for the first time. With the leftover fabric, he made four matching pillows. My sofa was complete.

So when I came home from work one day to find that someone had scribbled on one of the pillows with a black pen, I was not happy.

At first, I thought maybe my then-boyfriend or I had sat on the sofa with a pen in our pocket, but then I realized that the pattern was not that of an accidental, one-time pen leakage. Then I saw that another pillow was defaced in the same way. And the sofa itself – several lines about eight inches long right in the middle of the seat back and little circles in each of the buttons.

Three pillows. With ink stains. With the ink-stained side turned toward the back of the sofa.

The odds of that happening randomly are

1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/8 = 12.5%

That is, the odds of each pillow being turned with the ink side down are one in two. These are independent odds: the position of one pillow does not determine the position of another. To get the overall odds, multiply the independent odds by each other.

Oh man I hope I'm doing this right. It has been 20 years since I had probability and statistics. I did well (in grad school, when I actually attended the class, as opposed to college P&S, where I went four times and got only a C can you imagine?), but 20 years is a long time.

Whatever. What this number - 12.5% - tells you is that it is highly unlikely that all three pillows ended up ink side down by accident.

Conspiracy.

I called Esperanza. “Esperanza, I just found that someone drew on the sofa pillows with a pen. And on the sofa. I think it was Isabel.” Isabel was Esperanza’s two-year-old daughter.

“Oh, yes,” Esperanza said. “Don’t worry. I’ll clean it next time I come.”

“No!” I said sharply. “Don’t touch it. I’m going to take the pillows to the cleaners and see what they say.”

“OK,” she said cheerfully.

“You could have ruined it. It cost $1,000 to have that couch covered. I need to know the best way to do this,” I snapped.

“OK,” she said.

“I expect you to pay for everything,” I continued.

Silence.

“It was your daughter who did this,” I told her.

“OK,” she said again, not so cheerfully this time.

“Do not bring Isabel with you here any more if you are not going to watch her,” I said.

Here's a word problem: Your cleaning lady has caused $1,000 worth of damage. You pay her $60 once every three weeks. How do you recover your money, especially considering you probably don't want her to be your cleaning lady any more?

The dry cleaner shook his head sorrowfully when he saw the pillows. "No ma'am," he said. "Ah cain't get those stains out."

This was the last straw. Esperanza's cleaning had already slipped - she had gone from deep cleaning to maintenance cleaning mode. Yes, I wanted my windows washed every three weeks. I was paying what amounted to $20 an hour, which she may or may not have been declaring on her taxes. For 20 tax-free dollars, I want washed windows every time. Yes, I am a bitch that way.

Some of the things she had done that I don’t think someone should do if she is being paid $60 to clean a house included

• Leaving the pictures knocked askew after dusting them
• Leaving bookcases, cedar chests and beds five inches from their normal positions
• Leaving dirty rags on top of the radiator
• Leaving dirty rags in the kitchen sink
• Not cleaning the lint trap in the dryer
• Not bothering to put the trash in the trash can outside and leaving it against the side wall instead (my cleaning ladies just couldn't get that trash where it belonged)
• Dusting pictures so vigorously that the plaster crumbled around the nails, requiring me to re-plaster, re-paint and then re-hang the pictures
• Hiding the dishes (well, OK, maybe not hiding, but not bothering to put like with like, so I can’t find anything – if all the Tupperware is in one place, don’t you think that’s where you would put any other Tupperware?)
• Leaving a dryer full of clothes because she is in a hurry
• Not cleaning the cobwebs from the ceiling

Esperanza wasn't answering her phone and then she wasn't returning her messages. When I got a message from her that she was having problems with her husband, I thought, That's it. That's enough. I don't want any more drama. I hadn't wanted to tell her she was fired by answering machine, but when I couldn't ever speak to her, I finally left a message with her fifth grade son not to return and to drop the key in my mail slot. I was done. Any bad housekeeping in the future would be done by me, for free.

In which I get a new cleaning lady who does windows

I told you guys about Marisol, my cleaning lady in Chile. It was a few years again before I had another cleaning lady. It took me 18 months to find a job once I returned to the US from my Peace Corps stint. Companies were not begging to hire me. Something about the reputation the Peace Corps has for being a haven for chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies.

Sure, there are chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies in the Peace Corps, but not many: cigarettes are expensive for a Peace Corps volunteer! And is there any sane person who can hear that kumbayah song without wanting to punch someone? It reeks of Marty Haugen, Gather hymnal triteness. Protestants are lucky: they get the good music in church.

No, I was in the Peace Corps where we made brownies and went to the movies and talked about how we were going to frame our Peace Corps experience on our resumes. We were in it for the adventure and the career enhancement. If we changed or saved the world in the process, that would be great, but my great takeaway from my two years in the Peace Corps was that the world does not want to be changed or saved.

Back to the cleaning lady. It wasn't until I'd been back at work and saving money for a few years that I felt that I could afford a cleaning lady. I was at a point where I was going to indulge in major luxuries: fresh flowers, new underwear (including gym socks), and a cleaning lady. I was tired of living poor.

My real estate fairy godmother/landlady Mary Linda recommended her two cleaning ladies, who worked as a team.

Susan and Cindy were nice. They had thick Arkansas accents, which was logical because they lived on the other side of the river in Arkansas. They did a decent job - better than Marisol. Nobody was using my vegetable brush to clean the toilet. My house was surface cleaned once every three weeks: dusted, vacuumed, tub and toilet cleaned, floors washed. It was nice to have one weekend a month where I didn't have to do that stuff.

Then came the day when I patched the plaster around all the outlets I'd had installed when I bought my house. My bungalow had been built in 1922 when one outlet per room seemed extravagant.

Digression to related story:

When I was in Chile, several of the women from my group, most of whom did not have electricity or indoor plumbing in their country homes, went to Washington D.C. for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as exhibitors. One evening, they had supper at the home of the Chris, the woman at the Inter-American Development Bank who managed the grant my organization got from the IADB. When the women got back to Chile, they were telling the rest of us about all the appliances in Chris' apartment: a washing machine, a dryer, a microwave, a dishwasher, a TV, an answering machine.

"Wow," one of the Mapuche women gasped. "There must be outlets all over the place!"

End digression. Back to my house. When I moved in, I had an electrician install an outlet on every wall and a phone jack in every room. In retrospect, the phone jacks were unnecessary, but had I known that in 2001, I would be a rich woman today from my investments in cellphone stock.

The electrician was careless and had knocked holes bigger than necessary in the walls. He did not patch the plaster after he installed the plates.

I, being a complete non-confrontational wimp when it comes to holding people to the standard to which they should be held if I am paying $1,200 for a job because what if they get mad at me?, never said to him, "Hey. You need to finish this job and patch the plaster."

Nope. It was far easier for me to spend a few hours removing the plates, spreading wet plaster in the hole with a putty knife, waiting for it to dry, sanding it, painting it and re-attaching the plates than to tell someone to do his darn job.

I had finished the plastering etc. and had vacuumed the plaster dust from my beautiful wood floors. Oh how I loved that little bungalow. Loved it and would move back there in a second. I had put the vacuum cleaner, a mid-century Electrolux that the previous owner had left in the attic, back in its attic home. That's where it had to live: Old houses have almost no closet space and I sure wasn't going to waste clothes and shoe storage areas on cleaning equipment.

It wasn't until I was getting ready for bed that night that I noticed the plaster dust on the floor in the bathroom. I had forgotten to vacuum it.

Oh tosh, I said to myself. What a mess.

Then I remembered that Cindy and Susan came the next day. Cool. They would be washing the bathroom floor anyhow, so I would just leave it.

I was not in the habit of leaving my house in mess for the cleaning ladies. First, I am not a messy person. I do not like clutter. My house is usually pretty tidy, although marrying a man who descends from hoarders has made my life a little more challenging. Second, I did not want my cleaning ladies wasting time putting away my clean dishes and throwing away newspapers. I wanted them to do the stuff I really hate doing, like cleaning the bathroom and washing the floors.

I got home from work the next night and discovered that the plaster dust was still on the floor.

The normal procedure for cleaning a floor is to sweep or vacuum and then use a wet mop or a rag.

Cindy had neither swept nor mopped. Neither vacuumed nor ragged.

For $60, I can not clean my house myself.

We had already had a few incidents that I had overlooked, so much did I hate cleaning my own house. I came home from work one night to find the trash next to the back door in the kitchen with a note explaining that Susan couldn't get the back door open.

Yes, the key was tricky.

But - it was also possible to take the trash out the front door and carry it around to the trash can in the back yard. Going out the back door was the easiest way to the trash can but not the only way.

I fired them.

Only I did it the chicken way: I told them that I had to cut back on my expenses. I should have told the truth but then, I wasn't their manager. I wasn't responsible for their professional development.

Then I had a problem: I had become accustomed to the leisurely life of a woman who does not clean her own house all the time. I wanted that one out of three Saturdays back.

I asked around. My friend Maria Antonette recommended her cleaning lady. I had seen Toni in action cleaning her own house and I knew she didn't play. Her standards were high and her house was spick and span.

I asked Esperanza, her cleaning lady, to come in for an interview. We walked around the house as I pointed out what I would have her do.

She looked at my windows, which I think I had washed once since moving in and then only on the inside - the outsides were dirty - and asked me how I preferred her to clean them.

We were speaking Spanish, so I asked her to repeat her question, thinking I had misunderstood.

"How do you want me to clean the windows? With newspaper or with rags?"

I stopped. Turned. Looked straight at her.

"You do windows?" I asked.

She was as baffled as I was. "Isn't it part of cleaning a house?"

Wow. She hadn't been in this country long. I recovered quickly. "Yes, it is. Of course."

Then she asked me how I wanted her to do the laundry, explaining that her husband, who worked at FedEx, which was why I was pretty sure she was not an illegal alien, was very picky and she separated everything.

I asked again, in astonishment: "You do laundry?"

And again, I got her baffled response. "Isn't that part of cleaning a house?"

So yes, I hired her, even though she told me she would have to bring her infant daughter to work with her. How much trouble can a baby in a carrier be?

The first day she cleaned, when I came home from work, she was waiting for me. She wanted me to inspect to make sure she hadn't missed anything.

My house sparkled. The light reflecting from the inside of the windows made it look like I was inside a diamond.

I gasped. "It's perfect!" I told her. I was so impressed at how good the windows looked half clean that the next day, I got out the ladder and cleaned the outsides of the windows.

I had high hopes for a beautiful relationship.

Unfortunately, that was the high point. I should have fired her after she let my friend's dog get killed, if not just for solidarity then just because her toddler daughter never would have had the chance to scribble with black ink all over my newly reupholstered white sofa.

But I'll tell you about that later.

In which my cleaning lady uses a vegetable brush to scrub my toilet and the mystery of my frequent illness might have been solved

I know it seems like a rich lady, first world problem to complain about How Hard It Is To Find Good Help These Days, but that's not going to stop me. It is hard to find good help. It is hard to find someone who will clean your house as well as you would, that is, assuming you are a good housecleaner.

If you are a crummy housecleaner, it is pretty easy to find a cleaning lady who will do a crummy job. I have employed such women before.

 

It's not just a first world problem, either. It's hard to Find Good Help when you are a Peace Corps volunteer. I had a cleaning lady when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile.

Yes, you read that right. I was a Peace Corps volunteer with a cleaning lady. (I also had a gardener.)

Don't laugh. You, too, would get a cleaning lady if it cost you ten dollars for half a day's work and your alternative was to wash your clothes by hand in the bathtub.

Note I did not say your alternative was to take your clothes to a laundromat.

The only laundromats I ever saw in Temuco, my Peace Corps town, were the kind where you drop your clothes off and pick them up, clean, ironed and folded, three days later. It cost more than ten dollars for the service.

The theory of labor

For ten dollars, I could not only have someone come to my house and wash my clothes, I could also (in theory) have her clean my house.

Maybe you wouldn't get a cleaning lady for only ten dollars. Which, I might note, was four times the market rate for cleaning ladies in Temuco because I felt like paying someone only $2.50 for half a day's work was a bit much. Maybe you think hiring someone else to clean your house is exploitation.

I don't.

I think it is honest labor and that as long as you are not making your cleaning lady take daily photos of your nude, pregnant body or ordering her to get you a glass of ice water when or requiring that she pick up your dirty underwear off the floor (tacky), as the employer in the novel Minding Ben does, then your are not being exploitative. Cleaning is a job. Being a slave and a personal servant <> cleaning.

My grandmother was a maid before she got married. She worked in Chicago and in Milwaukee. Had a half day off on Saturday, which she would spend walking around town. She would walk to save the streetcar fare and spend the nickel savings on a candy bar, which was her meal.

My great aunt on the other side of the family was the head housekeeper for a wealthy Milwaukee family. Aunt Katy never married. She was in charge of a large household staff. Not too shabby for a woman who probably did not go past 8th grade.

My friend Julie has a cleaning lady. She says her friends are troubled by this - they think she is exploiting the cleaning lady.

What are the work options for an uneducated woman in this country? People don't become housecleaners because it's fun, but because they don't have many choices. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your house is unproductive. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your vomit? To clean your bloody underpants? To clear your clogged toilets? That's worth feeling guilty about. Clean up your own bodily fluids and pay a plumber to do the toilets if you'd rather pay $200 an hour than figure it out yourself.

But feeling guilty about hiring someone to do laundry and vacuum and dust and wash the floors? Dumb. Pay a fair wage, give her vacation pay once a year, be nice and move on. It's a job. That's all.

Washing clothes and why a laundromat was not an option

Back to my cleaning lady in Chile. I hired Marisol when I realized I did not want to spend my entire Saturday washing blue jeans, socks and underwear in the bathtub. Washing clothes in the tub is a pain in the neck. I was willing to pay someone, especially once I discovered that hanging out at the laundromat for two hours while my clothes almost cleaned themselves in a nice machine was not an option.

Which makes me think that perhaps a laundromat is a great business idea for Chile. Except it's not - who would go to the laundromat when she could pay someone to wash clothes in her house? Never mind. Capital is more expensive than labor in many places yet.

Although you do have to look at the total cost of ownership of bathtub washing.

What is threadbare?

Do you know the word "threadbare?" Have you ever tossed it off casually to describe your paint clothes or old gym socks?

You don't know what threadbare is.

Threadbare is when your blue jeans have been scrubbed on a rough pine board once a week for a year. All the blue has been scrubbed out and all that remains are the white vertical and horizontal threads.

There is a technical term that weavers use but it escapes me right now. The warp or woof or something. Anyhow, threadbare blue jeans can be see through. Yes they can. And socks only last a few months when washed on a board.

So when you are considering whether to take those clothes to the expensive wash service (that uses machines, I would expect), you need to include the cost of replacing the board-washed clothes frequently.

The other cost you have to include is replacing your gym clothes when they catch on fire because you have hung them to dry on the device that fits around the chimney of your wood burning stove.

Here's a story about wood burning stoves

1. Jamming a wood stove full of logs does not make it burn all the way through the night and provide for a nice, toasty house in the morning.

2. Jamming a wood stove full of logs just makes the fire burn hotter.

3. Which means that if there are gym clothes hanging right above the stove on the device that fits around the chimney, it is pretty likely that the clothes will start to burn.

4. Which means that you, who are about to fall asleep, smell something and think to yourself, "Did I leave the iron on? It smells like clothes burning."

5. And then you remember that 1. you don't have an iron and 2. even if you did, you would never leave it on so 3. what's burning?

6. It's the gym clothes that are burning.

You have to include all the costs when you are making a decision.

We hire a cleaning lady

My roommate and I hired Marisol. I thought it would be easy. "Marisol, please wash our clothes and clean whatever is dirty."

To me, the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling were perfectly visible. The grime on the walls and doors was visible. The dirt was screaming, Clean me!

It's not like there was clutter all over the place or a kitchen full of dirty dishes. I did not want her spending her time tidying. I wanted her to clean. I can tidy. Tidying is easy. Cleaning is a pain in the neck, which was why I was paying her to do it.

But Friday after Friday, I would come home to find the cobwebs intact. The walls grimy.

Finally, I started leaving her notes: Marisol, please clean the cobwebs on the northwest corner of the kitchen ceiling. Please wash the kitchen floor.

The day I left her the note to clean the grime around the doorknob and returned home to find an 8" circle of pure white around the knob and gray on the rest of the door, I realized I needed to be even more specific.

Marisol, I wrote, the doorknob looks great! Now please clean the rest of the door.

What I really wanted was a cleaning lady with initiative. One who would seek dirt and destroy it.

Perhaps her father had never played Seek and Destroy with her when she was a little girl. When we were getting ready to move out of our house in Spain, my dad gave me a bottle of 409 and a rag, explaining that my mission was to seek the dirt on the walls and destroy it with the 409. The house had to pass inspection or else. Or else I don't know what, but it probably wouldn't have been good for my dad's career.

I guess that's fair. Why should the people moving into the house after you have to clean your mess? I have adopted that attitude with every move, leaving every house and apartment spotless.

Alas, I have never moved into a house vacated by someone like me. I have never moved into a house being vacated by an air force brat. If I had, the house would have been clean.

Now we are getting to the main point of this story and I cannot believe I have never told it on this blog before as it is one of my all-time favorite stories.

I stay home from work because I am sick and observe that my cleaning lady does not optimize her work processes

One Friday, I stayed home from work. I was sick, which happened a lot when I was in Chile. Something about living outside your own culture that is really hard on the immune system. I think the culture shock in Chile might have been worse than culture shock in the middle of Africa. Chile looked western.

Looked middle class. I was in a three bedroom, two bath, brick tract house. My town had Mercedes dealership. On the main plaza there was a movie theater, a coffee/chocolate shop, two department stores, a bank, a church. I recognized everything.

But I recognized only the surface. This was still a foreign country and they did things differently. Every time I thought I understood what was going on, I discovered I had completely misunderstood. The popcorn was not salty, it was sweet. French fries were served with mayonnaise. (That was an easy adjustment to make, believe me.) Stores didn't take returns. Shopkeepers controlled scarce resources - why should they care if the customer was happy? Only really rich people had a checking account, so I had to go to the gas office and stand in line for 40 minutes to pay my bill.

I'm not saying that they do things wrong or badly in Chile, just differently (one benefit: the post office was open until 7 p.m.), and always feeling as if the ground is not solid under your feet* takes a lot of energy.

So I was sick a lot.

This Friday, I stayed home. Saw Marisol come in, start working. Wondered why she didn't do the laundry first so it would have more time to dry before the usual afternoon rains came.

My friend Paul wondered the same thing about his cleaning lady: She didn't seem to plan her activities with the critical path in mind. First you chop veg for the soup, then you get the soup started, then you clean the kitchen floor. You don't wash the floor and then do a lot of messy work in the kitchen.

I watched Marisol work and realized that she did more than I thought but there was still wasted activity. Whatever. As long as she did what was on the list, I suppose. I wasn't there to micromanage. I mostly just wanted clean clothes.

Marisol is cleaning the toilet with a hand brush

I returned to my book and only looked up again when I saw her kneeling next to the toilet, scrubbing it by hand.

Her hand was in the toilet. Even though there was a toilet brush behind the toilet. She was cleaning the toilet with a hand brush.

Why was she cleaning the toilet with a hand brush?

How odd. Marisol, I called. I didn't realize you brought your own cleaning supplies.

I don't, she answered, puzzled.

Then where did you get the brush that you're using?

This? she asked, as she looked at the brush. Oh, this is from under the kitchen sink.

From under the kitchen sink.

Marisol, I said slowly. That's the brush I use to scrub vegetables.

Oh! she replied cheerfully. Well, I'll put it back, then.

No, I told her. That's OK. I'm not going to be using it for vegetables any more.

And I didn't.

By the way, I have not been seriously sick since then. Just saying. It takes work to build an immune system.

* In little hotels, the bath mat would be turned so that the suction cups were facing upwards. I asked my friend Monica what that was about. "So you don't have to stand in the water!" she told me.