Thursday, November 19, 2009

Whine it like a mommyblogger, Part Trois

It's not all that often that I come right out and announce that I'm planning to indulge in a full-on white suburban über-privileged mommyblogger whine-fest. As in that "WANH!! I went to Sephora to buy a tube of $40 tinted moisturizer and they were sold out!" bullshit that makes you want to reach through your laptop, grab her expensively-moisturized neck, and squeeze until her eyes bulge.

So if your eyes roll over obviously well-to-do stay-at-home-mothers wringing their hands over a botched spa treatment, you'd better find something else to read. Because I'm here to complain about my weekly cleaning team.

I'll admit up front that having a bunch of women come to the house to dust, vacuum, and sanitize the bathrooms and kitchen is a wonderful luxury. After I hired them, among other benefits, incidents of food poisoning in the Buxom household fell to a record-breaking low.

And honestly, nobody should have to clean up the living quarters of a herd of pack rats, which is what we all are. I KNOW.

And I can certainly accomodate them. I can be flexible. Like when they started making the beds with the down comforters under the bedspreads--OK, that's not really what you want to do with a bunch of feathers--weigh them down under something else--but it's not hard to undo. And OK, they don't know not to wash iron skillets with soap and water? Fine. I'll hide all the skillets in the oven. And so what if they can't tell recycling from garbage and put everything in the wrong bin and I have to go outside and fix things until I feel like Phil Hartman as the Anal Retentive Chef?

But I was getting ready to type up some minutes last night, only to discover that my notes were missing. I immediately concluded that the cleaning team had found them and put them someplace. A place that made total sense to them, but as far as I was concerned, was magically counterintuitive.

And I was right. Unless you think the proper place for loose papers is in a basket under my bedside table. Under a needlepoint canvas.

And I didn't just find my handwritten notes. I found several pieces of unopened mail from the middle of October, to wit:

1. a bill
2. the stewardship packet from my church
3. my daughter's first trimester grades
4. a very official-looking IEP packet for my son
5. the instructions for how to schedule parent/teacher conferences at my son's school

Which means there are at least five people out there who think I'm an unorganized, ineffectual idiot.

Well, them and the entire internet.

12 comments:

  1. And this? Is why we clean for the cleaning ladies' arrival. My favorite trick? The gal who used oven cleaner on the range hood. Well, that's part of the oven, right? Anyway, the new range hood to replace the one that had the paint peeled off looks great.
    Sigh. It's so tiresome to over-priviledged, isn't it?

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  2. We had that problem at my parents' house. My mom finally declared certain areas (her desk, for example) "don't touch under any circumstance" areas, after they started throwing away important papers.

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  3. We have had the same cleaning lady for four years, and she still manages to put stuff in places that makes absolutely no sense.

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  4. I wish my cleaning lady would stick to cleaning and not tidying, too. I've finally closed off my computer room / office to her, because too many things have been tidied into disappearance. Sigh...

    But I love the sanitary kitchen, so...

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  5. I have a complaint about my weekly cleaning team, too.

    One of them is nine years old, and one is four, and they are NO USE.

    And the other one, a 40 year old man, the worst of the lot.

    I'll be over here shouting 'shut up whining' at you.

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  6. Oy...I think I'd have a powerful conversation with them! They should be able to comply with requests like how you want the beds made and NOT to wash the iron skillets. (But then what do I know? I'm my own housekeeper and not a good one at that! ;-)

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  7. I hear weird stories like this all the time from friends who have cleaning people. I wish I had weird stories like that.

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  8. Wait.

    You're doing needlepoint?

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  9. DUDE. Oh, dude. We hide stuff from our cleaning ladies. We love them, and they are awesome, but (a) they do not speak English and we do not speak Spanish, so any special requests have to be made through the manager over the phone IN ADVANCE so she can tell them what to do (or not do) and (2) for some reason they have a habit of throwing away the boy child's shampoo and body wash if it's less than half full. That is the ONLY thing they have EVER thrown away, but they do it every time. Puzzling, eh? So now we hide it in the linen cupboard before they come.

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  10. I think Colleen's suggestion that you have a "powerful conversation" with them is adorable. I'll replay that one in my head next Wednesday morning while I'm pre-cleaning my own house for the cleaning lady. "Powerful conversation" - too cute!

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  11. I love you.

    No really.

    I effin' love you.

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  12. Wait, your daughter's first trimester grades? Oh lawd, pregnant teenager ahoy.

    Unless, of course, you meant semester. In which case I snicker and stop acting like a bitch. :P

    Also- gorram cleaning ladies can't do anything right. I should know, I am one.

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Gentle Readers:

For the time being, I have turned off comment moderation. Please don't spam; it's not nice.

xxx, Poppy.