They could hire another cleaning service.

I bet she hasn't thought of that!

I think the key would be to get the housekeeper training so she can steal better stuff from corporations instead of households.

I'm torn between thinking that she needs to realize that dirt just doesn't matter all that much and that a significant part of the reason why I don't want a bigger house is that it would be more spaces to clean.

I don't want a bigger house for that reason. I want a cob house in the woods because you don't have to clean things made of dirt.

1,2: I'm unclear on why she doesn't want to hire another housekeeper, and not invested enough to go read all the blog posts to find out. Anyone want to summarize? Is it just because employing a housekeeper makes her feel privileged?

It's probably because it's her husband's fault they have a bigger house so he should deal with this shit.

Is Evil Husband refusing to pay another cleaning service or is Lady Soon-to-file trying to remove his counterargument to her "I didn't want this house and not unrelatedly I realized that I hate you"?

S1E2 of Veronica Mars (the Paris Hilton episode) is very much on topic. Weevil's such a great character. Time for a rewatch maybe.

I find it weird how insistent she is that it's unthinkable that housekeepers would have stolen it. Of course it's totally unsurprising for a replacement housekeeper to steel stuff. It's also unsurprising for babysitters to steal, that's how RWM's family lost all their jewelry and a bunch of gift cash. This happens all the time. I get not wanting to jump to an accusation because the consequences for the person is so severe, but she seems to have genuinely thought it was wildly implausible. That's super weird to me. Does she think only rich people do drugs? That said, the way she wrestles with realizing that was wrong was interesting to read about.

Does she think only rich people do drugs?

Save some for the beleaguered middle class.

My main takeaway is rage at the husband for initiating a move into a bigger house that he was not willing to clean.

My assumption is that she doesn't want to hire housecleaners again because she doesn't want to be in the position of worrying that they're going to steal from her. Which seems like a fairly reasonable reaction to me -- the kind of supervision and care you need to put into making it hard for someone to steal from you is an unpleasant and insulting way to interact with anyone.

9 made me bristle a little on her behalf. Sure, it was wishful thinking, but the kind of wishful thinking that makes you treat other people you're in any kind of relationship with as trustworthy until you have some individualized reason not to trust them makes you a good person.

I really do feel bad for her.

Her thought process on firing the housecleaners, from one of the linked posts:

I realized that, no matter what, I would be continually monitoring my possessions for theft, and I don't want to do that. I need to be able to keep my own normal possessions in my own house, and not have to move everything of value into a giant vault every time trusted professionals come to do work. When I was a babysitter, I had access to people's jewelry and cash, and there was no "I wonder if I should take that?" (I did get into the cookies rather more aggressively than the average family might have anticipated.) When I did in-home eldercare, I had access to clients' checkbooks, credit cards, passwords, narcotic medications, various antiques/valuables--and "Should I take advantage of this access to steal something?" could not be (and was not) something to even CONSIDER; forcing myself to consider it makes me feel queasy, and that is how it MUST BE. Our main housecleaner, I am certain of it, could see a heap of diamonds and cash on my bureau and she would not even be tempted to touch them; she would go out of her way NOT to touch them; the relationship is impossible if she isn't violently emotionally opposed to touching/taking them.

I feel bad for her too. My point was just that I get that it's an admirable way to treat people, but you have to know that living that way has has the downside that every so often someone is going to really take advantage of you. I would have thought that someone made that choice knowing that every once and a while you lose your bet, but that's worth it for the rest of the time. But instead she seems to genuinely have thought that poor people never do anything wrong.

Yeah. I found myself thinking about original sin, actually. That you can value people and treat them well on the basis of a belief that with a very few pathological exceptions all good people who would never do anything really wrong; or you can value them and treat them well on the basis of an understanding that all sorts of people, even the ones we love and trust, do terrible things all the time and you just need to figure out how to work with that.

Interesting that you mention original sin, because I was just thinking that the reason I find it weird is that it ends up at a very "christian" endpoint in terms of behavior, but the logic getting there is so completely non-christian.

I believe she group up in an extremely religious background, had a shortlived first marriage, and then branched out on her own. No idea what her religious beliefs are now, but they don't seem to go to church.

I only read a little -- did she tell the cleaning service that their temp seems to have stolen stuff? And they didn't offer to make it good?

I wonder if the husband reads the blog.

I always hope my wife doesn't read this one.

Oh man, that poor woman. This resonates with me in a bunch of different ways. Many aspects of her situation have very close echoes with our situation.

Thanks, but I'm not that bad.

Ha.

I only read a little -- did she tell the cleaning service that their temp seems to have stolen stuff? And they didn't offer to make it good?

They did offer to repay the money, but at first, the main person didn't quite seem to believe it was necessarily theft. Maybe by the time Swistle ended the service, the person believed it - I'm not sure.

Swistle has an agreement with her husband that he does not read her blog. As far as I know, there's never been any question about him doing so anyway.

And they offered to repay the later theft -- the earlier, larger amount of missing cash which she had blamed on her son's carelessness but in light of the later theft seems to have probably been due to the same replacement cleaner, I don't think she even asked for.

Shared space and other people's mess is a complex topic, more so when they're people you love. I agree with others that fixing this is on the husband who wanted the bigger house.

I wonder whether he reads any of what she writes? She's a clear and insightful writer.

That said, disposition of interiors, cleaning and decorating them, definitely tough. Lots of variation in how surroundings make people feel-- some are genuinely distraught at a plate with crumbs on the coffee table overnight, others see even rudimentary sweeping/tidying as having a huge activation energy, and of course all of this is marinated in other interactions. Verbal or actual inconsiderateness can make a salt shaker a decisive pawn in a passive aggressive struggle for power.

I have friends who have hired a single cleaner, she's the only one who comes, which means they adjust to her life on holidays or when she has family issues or illness.

25 written before 18, obvs.

That's what we have. It's just one person. When she travels or is ill, we just roll with it.

Her three daughters all have post-graduate degrees and are amazing (as is our housekeeper). They were actually recently featured in The Guardian for an orthogonal issue of poverty and immigration.

I'm not going to go to the original source, but she definitely seems trapped. Her systems aren't aligned with her desires and if she's bright and realistic then I believe her assessment of all the constraints. So she's stuck and turning in circles, rattling on each of the constraints in turn. But they're all solid, so she keeps turning to the next. I've been there, it sucks.

I'm not really a very sympathetic person, so I'd tell her to either make peace with it or really blow up the system, but don't hang out in the misery of limbo forever.

It is surprisingly (maybe unsurprisingly? Very much, anyway) unpleasant living with someone who treats domestic chores as not their problem at all, if you haven't internalized the idea that you really are completely responsible for the household. My marriage, there was a long period of time where I was working stupidly long hours and Tim was doing more than half of the chores, and I was very grateful and doing as much as I could. And then there was a more equitable chunk of time where I was working for the state and could pull my weight domestically, and we split things pretty evenly. And then a couple of years before he left, he mostly quit doing anything at all, and I felt as if I'd lost my mind. I was trying to conceptualize it as a tradeoff for the early years when I was working law firm hours, and not get mad about it, but it was remarkably draining and consistently upsetting. And as a result of my picking up less than 100% of the work he'd stopped doing (there was a weird dynamic where he'd tell me not to do particular tasks because he was going to do them, but then not) our apartment was completely disgusting.

But yes, I think she's trapped. If she stays married she either cleans the giant house she didn't want by herself, hires cleaners again despite the trust issues, or lives in squalor. One wonders what level of appreciation her husband has of the situation.

If the bathroom floor is supposed to be clean, why did they put it underneath where you pee?

Occasionally she admits that she just doesn't portray the good parts of Paul because the blog is for venting, but god he drives me crazy. I hope he makes her happy in other ways. He's the type of person who if you ask them to do something for you, they will cheerfully agree and then carry out the narrowest possible interpretation of the request. And only do it that one time, and then go back to baseline.

I hope he makes her happy in other ways.

He probably puts out.

31. Just put down one of those wraparound rugs to keep your feet warm while you are there.

Marriage and childrearing both carry serious compromises to autonomy and self-image, and potentially huge rewards that can make the compromises worth making, if nothing else the chance to love someone else regardless of outcome. Emotional solitude, or too much overlap between professional success and self worth, those are also traps, aging is a trap.

a very close friend is in a failed marriage & sticking it out until the kid is older. it drives me to absolute despair that she is spending even one more day, let alone night, with him. aaaaaarrrrggghhh.

Disclaimer: I've only read this discussion and the last linked post, and really only skimmed that. I'll have to take Heebie's word for it that Swistle is adorable. My first thought was that she sounded pretty alien to me, in an annoying UMC WASPy suburbanite way. She could be on a Desperate Housewives-type show. My second thought is she's clearly aware of the stuff I was picking up on and ambivalent about it, so I'll give her some credit for self-awareness, self-criticism, and good writing.

Coincidentally we had a housecleaner today. We do this roughly every 2 months or so, generally right before company or some other house-straining event. (So it's hard to say how often we'd "generally" do it, having company over is fraught these days and house-straining events are unpredictable, but anyways.) For whatever it's worth I feel like we don't get her instead of doing the normal cleaning ourselves, but when we don't have time to do it ourselves. So maybe I'm not annoyed by Swistle, but by the desperate housewife within me? Or defensive about the assumption that my wife would be stuck cleaning a lot more than me if we didn't hire a cleaner? I dunno.

For whatever it's worth, my wife cleans more than me, but I think (hope?) it's just a little more than me, and she has more pack rat tendencies than me, so if I tried to clean I'd spend half my time asking her "and why shouldn't we put this on the curb?" in more or less diplomatic phrasing.

32. There's a comedy show about campy vampires, one of them is an energy vampire who's in fact just a regular boring cubicle dude.

Does Paul ask her to make changes also, or is he in his lifestyle indifferent to her existence?

My first thought was that she sounded pretty alien to me, in an annoying UMC WASPy suburbanite way. She could be on a Desperate Housewives-type show.

I dunno - this says a lot more about you than her. She works at the local library. Before that, she did eldercare. She reads a lot, is extremely progressive, a decent amount of social anxiety, and does not think about her looks very much.

I feel like I have more than my fair share of social anxiety and drinking let's me share it with others.

Does Paul ask her to make changes also, or is he in his lifestyle indifferent to her existence?

I guess the latter? I get the picture that he cares about her as a person and they enjoy each other's company. But he doesn't ask her to make changes because he's the sort of person who just basically does what he wants and isn't particularly considerate of others, and doesn't notice/expect others to be considerate of him.

35. My parents did that, so did I. "Failed" is a huge spectrum- from coexistence seasoned by discontent and some level of strife to malice or addiction or worse. The milder versions are IMO a pretty common choice/fate since two households cost a lot more than one.

On whether she is adorable: she may not be universally charming, especially if words in CAPS kills you, but I very much enjoyed the "Christmas card" portion of this recent post, for example.

So this year my strategy is to choose the WRONG card for each person. It is quite fun, as it turns out. For my serious conservative keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas aunt and uncle, I happen to remember that last year I chose a traditional gold-and-holly Hope Peace Joy card; I intended it to reflect my election-outcome-related feelings--but they could of course interpret those sentiments however they pleased. THIS year I am sending them the bright and whimsical reindeer card I KNOW I have not sent them before. (Reindeer are representatives of SECULAR Christmas.)

Their daughter, my cousin, is super cheerful and happy and perhaps halfway to escaping her conservative evangelical Republican upbringing and becoming a progressive Democrat and I love that journey for her. I would LIKELY have sent her the bright and whimsical reindeer card last year, or else one or my other cheerful cards, perhaps the "Merry and Bright!" one with Christmas lights, or the Victorian cats one. So THIS year I will send her one of my more serious/traditional cards--which still fall within my own standards for what is a good card, so they're not TOO serious/traditional. She's not going to think "Whoa, what happened here?," she is just going to see a typical Christmas card.

I hadn't seen the sidebar before and didn't realize she had five children, three of them minors. Five children, a husband who is not good about chores, and a large house you only agreed to move into because he promised you wouldn't have to take on additional cleaning responsibilities, seems like a recipe for an untenable level of resentment.

In her place, I think I'd hire another housecleaner (or the same one, with an explicit agreement to skip cleaning on days she's not available, rather than bringing in an employee), and just try to live with a moderate amount of discomfort and stress. It's either that or divorce/murder my husband.

34.2 is nicely put.

three minors

She's stuck. Hire a single housekeeper who works alone, deal with messy Christmas, trust but verify on all the finances.

Stories like this, it always impresses me what a powerful technique it is being willing to play chicken with your partner's and family's wellbeing and happiness. If you're just straightforwardly willing for your partner to be unhappy, you can pretty much do what you want and count on them to make the situation tolerable.

Usually that's more of an office thing.

45 is my friend's situation exactly. it is *enraging* to witness.

In the case of my own local dear friend with shitty husband, he up and left at the end of August. I am relieved. It's been a hard few months for her, but in some ways she was happier almost immediately, and now she's mostly thriving in a way that wasn't possible in the marriage. (She still has sad/bitter moments, of course. But it really is amazing how quickly it can get better when a toxic person leaves.)

38
I dunno - this says a lot more about you than her.

That's fair. For whatever it's worth, the biggest single detail that caught my eye was the intro, about drinking gin before cleaning the bathroom. Obviously no one likes that but self-medicating before it, especially with gin specifically, sounded a bit too much like something from Schitt's Creek.

Sexism or classism aside, there might be an urban vs. rural thing. Where I live a house with three bathrooms probably costs twice as much as it would where my parents live. That may have factored into some of my assumptions.

ha. I just randomly clicked through to the beginning of her blog (or at least this incarnation of it), and landed near this post which starts off complaining about Paul for exactly the same things as now, but leading up to the paragraph about what he does bring to the table and why he's a good partner.

The post is from 2006 when she had four young children, including baby twins. I wonder if she'd still agree with it.

My general recommendation is always "more adults in the system" and it could be useful here too. Co-housing has its strengths. I'd also look to the kids to figure out why they're not more useful since they're quasi-adults.

Much as I adore my children, I did not successfully raise them to be good roommates, or at least to behave as good roommates in households that I am also in. Getting either snappy obedience or actively thoughtful domestic cooperation out of a late-teen/early-twenties kid is more than I ever managed.

Which is meant to say that I'm unsurprised the kids are unhelpful. I think "you have to do chores because I have authority over you; your father doesn't have to do chores because I don't have authority over him," is a hard sell.

I just want the poop flushed and the trash out, but we're still working on it.

oh this dude will have to be left, i'm nearly certain of that. emotional leach. my friend's parents split when she & her sibling were around the current age of friend's child. she is waiting until her kid is sturdier-older. a judgment no one can fault her for of course, short of kiddo being in university. so i'm a sympathetic ear & support & happy to be so. what grinds my gut is the hours days months years she isn't with someone who finds her utterly groovy & whom she in turn adores but is instead constantly surfing waves of indifference, callous disregard & astonishing self absorption. & i know there is zero guarantee of finding someone fabulous but the combo of emo blackhole & lack of mr/ms groovy is sucky in the extreme.

I've never had a cleaner (or a servant). Relatives and friends periodically try to convince me to try it, but .... my mother's family in India had 'em, and I saw that on visits as a kid. No way I'm going to have somebody serving me personally: cooking, cleaning, whatnot. No way. So with that said, I don't understand why she doesn't just suck it up: it's only money, FFS.

Sure, hire a cleaner that is the only one you get, not from a service. Sure, whatever. Suck it up, buttercup, you have something rare that most Americans cannot afford. Just pay more, and you'll get a better service: isn't that what your life is all about anyway? Jesus, I mean, I could *afford* a cleaner -- that's not the point. Nobody should be *employed* cleaning up somebody else's piss in their home. Nobody. If I can't do it, then I should live in a house with a toilet that smells of stale piss.

I hope it's clear that I'm not saying she's wrong to feel violated. But rather, that these problems have a simple solution for people rich enough to have houses with three bathrooms.

Yeah. I get the impression she's was fine with doing the cleaning in the smaller house she wanted to live in with the help of the other adult making the house smell like stale piss. Because you're right -- cleaning up after another adult who could do it for themselves is a lousy position to be in.

50. The good points she lists in that post are mostly negatives ("he doesn't give me a hard time about the messiness of the house" (which he doesn't himself clean?), "he doesn't spend all our money, leaving me wondering how we're going to pay the bills"). I mean, it's great that he's not a storybook villain in all respects, but man, those are some low expectations.

There's a working class thing where the wife would get all the money and the man just an allowance. Or I've heard about that.

for people rich enough to have houses with three bathrooms.

Like Cyrus alluded to above, I think they're somewhere midwestern where this is not necessarily an expensive house. She says in the post that $1000 loss is enough to feel painful but not an impossible situation.

59: I had that thought, too. I can understand when you have young children, how you'd see him as doing helpful emotional labor. But I think that would wear thin once the kids are not quite so overwhelming and he still can't manage to find his own towel.

Jesus, I mean, I could *afford* a cleaner -- that's not the point. Nobody should be *employed* cleaning up somebody else's piss in their home. Nobody. If I can't do it, then I should live in a house with a toilet that smells of stale piss.

Chet, out of curiosity, do you have kids?

My mom lives in Flyover Country. She's had a cleaner for years. When she came to SF to live with us right before the pandemic, she continued to pay her cleaner to come over weekly and "clean" even though her apartment was unoccupied for .... 2yr. I'm betting that that cleaner was more scrupulous about my mom's belongings than the typical one that shows up from a service.

Setting aside my visceral dislike of having servants, if you're going to do it, you have to get reliable ones, and keep them. And that costs money. One way or the other, you're going to pay for them.

The housecleaners came today. Our usual cleaner (who seems to own the business, which may or may not be a formal business) (we did not hire her ourselves; we were passed on to her by our previous cleaner, who quit the business; this is why I am so vague/uninformed) is out for medical reasons, so she sent her helper plus a relative she said she had used as a helper before.

When I got home, on the kitchen counter was a plastic bag containing some miscellaneous items, one of which was Edward's brand new driver's license, so I left it on the counter to ask him about. When he got home and saw the bag, he went running upstairs. He came back down to say that those items were the contents of a box in which he keeps his money, and the box was gone. He'd had approximately $300 in the box. He knows it was in there as recently as yesterday, because he took some out to buy something. https://www.swistle.com/2021/11/01/an-appalling-story-with-very-little-hope-of-any-good-ending-but-maybe/

This is genuinely very odd. I think she should call Colombo.

heebie: no, I'm single. The only reason I described my position on cleaners, is in order to lay out my biases. Specifically, that my sympathies will always lie on the part of the servant, and not the employer. I'm not saying that others should adopt my position. But it does color the way I think about cleaners and domestic servants generally: it's work, and it needs to be properly paid-for, and I think too few people understand this. Or, what they think "properly paid-for" is, is still paltry.

Compared with 2017, fewer Americans now mention spouses or romantic partners as a source of meaning in life. Around one-in-ten U.S. adults (9%) now mention their spouse or romantic partner or their romantic or dating life, down from 20% in 2017.

heebie, not sure what you see in this blogger exactly. She seems nice enough but she's a stay at home mom (with library shelving job now that the kids are older) who doesn't seem to like it or her husband much.

(And I say this as someone who hates cleaning the bathroom and cannot get shiv to do it reliably )

Chet the thing is the pee needs to be wiped up, so the options are a) everyone cleans up their own pee, b) someone (probably mom) cleans up everyone's pee for free or c) someone is paid to do it.

Floor grate?

The list in 50 reads very much "he has ADHD" repeated with slight variations. Which, of course, is his job to come up with better coping strategies for, and the cat barf one is just straight up assholery. But still there's a clear pattern...

Just a wire mesh floor in the bathroom and you can have the floor clean itself.

wow 67 is bleak. i mean the actual life of my imperial pseud would indicate that partnering is not an unalloyed good, & indeed the quality of the partnering is key. it's such an incredibly deep important part of my happiness that i find 67 grim.

70: I don't see a clinical diagnosis evidenced here. He just doesn't think those things are his job.

Swistle seems to have an ingratiating style similar to heebie's own, so I can see why heebie likes her. She seems like a nice, conscientious person caught in an impossible situation for her own emotional well-being.

Cala @ 73: this seems pretty accurate. Men who just don't think certain things are part of their job are ..... like spiderwebs in the corners of rooms. All his "not so great" behaviours seem like typical male behaviour, right down to "I do that, too".

72. US still higher in 2021 than any other country surveyed. I'd be interested to see {west coast}/{rest of US} breakdown.

75: also it would not be implausible to have a higher tolerance for momblogs than I do.

Not trying to snark, glad to read about your happiness, more happy Habsburgs a definite improvement. I'm interested in how others think about meaning, this thread and also the survey are giving me something to think about.

It's been years and years and years since we used to talk about this stuff all the time here, but I get stuck on how vulnerable stay at home (or only lightly employed) parents are. I can see thinking it's a reasonable decision for the family unit considered as a whole, but for a woman who ends up in a position like the linked blogger, she doesn't have a lot of leverage at all. And if her marriage ends, there she is in middle age starting a career path without much work history. It seems like a really rough spot.

If she becomes a housekeeper she can steal shit.

Yeah, she's in a really difficult structural position, and her husband sounds like the kind of guy who, while not necessarily an asshole, takes full advantage of the way societal expectations are set up to free ride on her labor as much as possible.

It's really horrible to use those expectations for anything but getting out of school committees.

79: I see it a lot where I teach. Marriage falls apart, woman is in late 30s or early 40s getting her degree so she can support herself. Usually multiple kids, didn't work so the kids wouldn't be raised by daycare, you know the routine. I had one break down in my office once because coming to class when the professor was pregnant and she'd been taught it was education or kids not both was too much to bear.

Husband doesn't sound cruel but he hasn't changed in fifteen years. That's a long time of scrubbing toilets in a house you didn't want.

Actually she posted over the summer, worrying about precisely that: https://www.swistle.com/2021/07/28/financially-dependent/

Is "ingratiating" an insult?

Not necessarily, but it probably has negative connotations in most contexts.

Often, but I'm pretty sure that's not what Teo meant and he just picked the wrong word. But I've been failing to come up with the right word. Affable?

It seems like the answer to 79 and 84 should be some kind of insurance. Like if your spouse dies the idea is you have enough life insurance to move somewhere and get started in a new career. But there's obvious problems with divorce insurance that don't apply to life insurance.

The problems would apply to life insurance if murder wasn't so hard.

If you're married to someone with assets, of course you do get half the marital assets, but even a healthy-sounding sum of money isn't enough to get a middle-aged person to and through retirement. And lots of people don't have much in the way of assets at all.

79 and 83: I have a guy friend who did this, and he's the stay-at-home although it started long before they had kids. He went to law school and has a Masters in Historic preservation and never really launched. She's a doctor and he followed her through all of the residency and fellowship spots, and she has bipolar illness challenges which meant she could not transfer to deem, got kicked out of one program and finish3d somewhere else. When she was doing hem/onc fellowship he started a Geography PhD. Now he's the stay at home Dad to their twins. Her family (Italian/Peruvian) from Queens is over the top and followed her to Texas.

He has other challenging family stuff to deal with right now too. He had very specific things he was interested in and couldn't quite find a job he wanted, and there was always an excuse that her training had to come first, so now he basically manages everything and makes sure she gets sleep, and if we get too many nutty texts, we let him know.

He might have been a good small town lawyer in Georgia. He would love to do planning stuff, but now he's a stay at home Dad and we worry occasionally that she'll do something to offend her department chair that will get her fired.

i mean what did sissi find meaning in??? elaborate dressmaking-millinery projects for sure! https://twitter.com/ddoniolvalcroze/status/1383567767727575045?t=xeYCVBYzHfBnAvtIbrJFWw&s=19
https://twitter.com/DrLindseyFitz/status/710547814263214080?t=dkYjLP4oBs5epjS4q6JvgQ&s=19

Ever since Teo got married, he's been so mean.

90: Right, it's not going to get you to retirement, but it is going to get you started. Someone with no employment may still be screwed, but someone underemployed like in the post we're talking about should be able to work something out if they have a couple years of cushion. Like she's talking about whether she should go back to school or change careers but she doesn't want to, but if she could do that now then she could do it after divorce if she had like 150K.

93: It happens when the couple focuses on each other.

Ha, I totally missed the connection between 85 and my 74. I certainly didn't mean it as an insult! Probably not the best word choice, though. "Affable" isn't quite right but close.

There's an element of active and apparent effort to the style that "affable" doesn't quite capture. But it's not a bad thing!

Avuncular?

Avauntular?

"Work something out" is still pretty precarious -- say, 150K would last you five years of income supplementation, and then you're living on what you can make as someone in their mid-late fifties whose career started in their late forties/early fifties. You probably wouldn't starve, most people don't, but that's pretty high odds of spending the rest of your life fairly broke.

Aviator?

From the link in 84:

What was MOST important to me was having lots of kids .... If right now I had a career plus only two children, because that's the number that could have worked with a career ... that would have been pretty low compensation for the loss of the rest of the children I'd wanted.... it makes me FURIOUS that society is set up this way.

I kind of lose sympathy for her with this post. It's not society's fault that she couldn't figure out a way to have five children and also a career -- it's the fault of logic and her own choices, unless she's "furious" at society for not making kibbutz-style collective childrearing the norm.

heebie @ 84: that post is ..... not doing her any favors. I mean, she's a good writer, but the more I read of her writing, the less I like her, and the less I feel sympathy. She writes that she came into this situation with open eyes, that she chose this situation over ones where she'd have greater autonomy and resources on purpose, b/c she got things from this situation ("What was MOST important to me was having lots of kids, and I don't see any way I could have combined that with a career") that she knew were incompatible with autonomy.

102: Maybe kibbutz-style collective child rearing should be the norm.

It is in kibbutzes.

I feel like faulting people for getting what they choose and getting really tired of it is kind of harsh.

Kibbutzim.

Nobody should be *employed* cleaning up somebody else's piss in their home.

Chet, you've said that you're single and without (yet?) children. I take it you've also not had to deal with an elderly, incapacitated parent who needs help with basic everyday life, including what they call 'toileting' (helping a dependent patient with his/her elimination needs)? and I sincerely hope that you never do. But the fact is, sometimes we do have to *employ* people to clean up after dependent people (the very young, the very old, the very ill) who cannot do it for themselves.

I get the discomfort about having a housecleaner (the master-servant dynamic; the exploitation of a woman with less education/lower socioeconomic status/fewer prospects...). And I think people (er, mostly women, let's face it) should be paid a whole lot more money for the work of care that they do.

But the notion that such work should always be unpaid really makes me nervous, really gets my feminist knickers all in a knot. Because if a certain type of traditional women's work is naturalized as a labour of love, as a kind of work that is not work, that is only sullied by exposure to the cash nexus, if you will: isn't that basically saying that women should be cleaning up other people's sh*t for free?

I take it you've also not had to deal with an elderly, incapacitated parent who needs help with basic everyday life, including what they call 'toileting' (helping a dependent patient with his/her elimination needs)?

We didn't even consider not having help do that. Babies are fine, even though they poop more than adults.

100: I don't disagree, but that strikes me as a pretty normal amount of financial precariousness.

107: Bless you.

Just Plain Jane: You're right, let me amend:
1. I'm single, no kids
2. I have dealt with an incapacitated parent, and yeah, there's both skill and temperament there that I don't possess, and I surely understand why it's necessary and OK to pay someone (well) to do that
3. I was really speaking to the vast mass of people in my class who employ housecleaners because it fits their *lifestyle*. They're perfectly able to do the work themselves, but they prefer to use that time for more work, or pleasure.
4. I do think there's a difference between care workers and *cleaners*.
5. If it's not obvious, I'm male. And I would have just as much trouble with some female relation cleaning my house. When my mom visited, she tried to do so, and we had a little bit of an altercation when she persisted and cleaned my bedroom against my express wishes. She'd come to visit to go to a Springsteen concert with all of us, and I was so angry that she'd disobeyed my express rules (right down to putting a sign on my bedroom door barring her cleaning it) that I didn't go to the concert and didn't speak to her for a week.

I assume she's furious at society for not having a meaningful safety net where she could live cheaply, have dependable medical care and housing, and support herself in a low skills job, despite not having invested in a career for 30 years.

The thing where nursing care goes from expensive to super expensive isn't when they need help toileting, but when they need help "transitioning," which is basically being able to go from a bed to a chair or one chair to another.

This is kind of a derail, but speaking of mid-life. I today saw a just-published paper that looks like a capable implementation of a solid idea that I had hopes, unrealistic ones, of exploring if I manage to find a better position later this year. On the one hand, nice to see that it is indeed a good idea and the results of the initial implementation. On the other hand....

102: it's less that and more that she says she didn't really want a career either. Can't give up or figure out how to balance what you don't have. Not surprising if she grew up planning to be a Christian Mom (tm) but .. there doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness that society (tm) didn't say to do what she did. I know a fair amount of people with four kids and careers and it's taken a few forms: dad stays home, both parents scale back, family hires help.

Just Plain Jane: Should have added:

6. I described my position on domestic servants just so it was clear where i was coming from. I also noted that the solution to swistle's problem is to pay her servants more, and to ensure greater control over whom she gets. And to put up with a little theft, b/c that's just the way it works.

I read the original post. Frankly, these are rich people's problems: only rich people have a thousand dollars in cash lying about, or "piles of diamonds" .... I mean *really*. During the pandemic at one point I had $200 in a jar on the bookshelf. B/c boy howdy, it was hard to get to the bank, and I needed it to pay tips and buy food at the farmer's market. But otherwise, cash? really?

heebie: I suspect she'd find that she didn't like the kind of societies where she could get that kind of safety net at age 50, after 30yr of not investing in a career. Because in those societies, everybody (except the richest) do not get cleaners for their homes, nor do they get three-bathroom homes; that's part of how those societies pay for all that safety-net. Of course I would love such a society, and would trade all my savings to live in one; sadly the one I know well (France) doesn't appear to be a safe bet these days, what with .... current events.

Just Plain Jane: oy, I forgot to mention that I also have no problem with paid child care, as long as it's properly remunerated and offered by the state to all families. It's specifically this 'private provision of domestic servants to the well-off' that gets my goat.

only rich people have a thousand dollars in cash lying about, or "piles of diamonds" .... I mean *really*.

Oh for fuck's sake. She does not have piles of diamonds. Her 20 year old son hoarded his birthday and graduation money and other savings for a few years and had socked away $1K.

I should not bother responding to that kind of hostile exaggeration, but here we are.

If you have "piles of diamonds" you probably need more than just the Preparation H.

heebie: I'm referring specifically to this quote:

Our main housecleaner, I am certain of it, could see a heap of diamonds and cash on my bureau and she would not even be tempted to touch them

4. I do think there's a difference between care workers and *cleaners*.

Okay, yeah, fair point (and of course I agree!).

I guess I just don't like the idea of a private/domestic sphere of unpaid labour, since that basically means women doing the work for free.

(But hiring a cleaner for *lifestyle* reasons is gross and exploitative, I do agree).

122 was me.

Oh my god. That's a hypothetical. If she were dripping with riches, Scrooge McDuck style, her housekeeper would not have a fleeting temptation.

Scrooge McDuck's riches and kept in a separate pool that you could just keep the cleaner out of.

122: I'm sorry then, what are the acceptable reasons for hiring a cleaner? I haven't, because I'm cheap, but when I consider it, I'd use it to make my life a little easier by outsourcing some of the second shift so I can do other things like maybe hang out with my kids instead of spending the weekend cleaning after spending the week working. "Sorry kids mom has to clean the bathroom.
You have fun with Dad at the park tho." Similarly, I hear some people get takeout because they'd rather not cook and do something else instead. Even if they're physically capable of cooking!!

Well, it was the kids' money, right?

Cala: People of all levels of economic security and wealth get takeout. But to have domestic servants requires that one is well-off, and it's that which bothers me. In your scenario, the answer is that Dad must also do his proper turn at domestic work.

I didn't read it. I guess I'm part of the last cohort to use cash for most purchases under $100? I don't find it odd to have $1,000 cash in the house.

O RLY?

The low-life is in Greenfield.

I would probably do it differently if there was much criming happening here. We mostly have porch pirates and kids cruising at night for unlocked cars (which they keep doing because people keep forgetting).

An old man got murdered for the stuff in his house, but that was by a relative.

122: I'm sorry then, what are the acceptable reasons for hiring a cleaner?

As long as the cleaner is well-paid -- union wages, and time and a half on statutory holidays -- I don't give a flying f*ck about anyone's reasons.

Which message I was trying to impart, except that I also wanted to engage with Chet's critique of the weird dynamic of engaging household "help." I guess I didn't explain my position very well. Or perhaps you deliberately misunderstood me?

We have a housekeeper and three bathrooms! I shall go stash my riches in the Cayman Islands and form all sorts of LLCs that loan money to each other in a circular ponzi scheme!

We have three bathrooms if you count the patio.

And are we using "domestic servant" and "housekeeper" interchangeably now? Or just trying to find the most uncomfortable word to signal class dominance and exploitation?

Maybe I could hire a governess* to take the kids to the park while I scrub the bathroom!

hang on! chetan - what if the cleaner is fairly paid? and treated with respect? this is ridiculous - there are women who *want* those jobs and use them to support their families! how is it helping things for the people with disposable income to refuse on principle to pay fair wages to hire folks looking for low-skilled and valued work??? depriving these (overwhelmingly) women of fairly remunerated, respectful employment isn't going to magically produce alternative great well-paying jobs.

we hired someone to come every two weeks and give the place a thorough once-over after my better half's heart attack, as he typically takes the laboring oar on housework while i beaver away billabley. she is wonderful! we love having her and pay her well. she had her citizenship interview a couple of weeks ago and we are all hoping she is granted citizenship, would be a wonderful co-citizen. we may forego her services in the new year bc the better half is feeling much stronger and he very much dislikes *personally* feeling that he is not contributing, but that's about intrahousehold feelings of equity-balance. there is nothing i can see wrong about us paying her well to do work we respect. place has an absolutely lovely air of serenity when she's been, soooo nice.

also the hiving off of takeout as a different case is ludicrous - kitchen work is outrageously dangerous and exploitative, restaurant workers are top of class in the wage theft rankings! oh my go the shittiness of most restaurant jobs that cranked/are cranking out all of everyone's takeout people you have no idea. the death rate of line cooks pre vaccine! chetan - take a deep breath and have a think. that kitchen workers are not obliged to suck up to you in person in the way that domestic servants had to in your grandmother's household is not the winning distinction here.

You said it's gross to hire a cleaner for lifestyle reasons - I didn't have to read much into that to think that maybe you thought one shouldn't hire a cleaner for lifestyle reasons.

You said it's gross to hire a cleaner for lifestyle reasons

I was attempting to acknowledge Chet's point about UMCs hiring working-class women to do the dirty work; while also, and at the same time, critiquing his notion that 'womens' work' should be done for free in some putatively 'private' realm. I guess I didn't, and still do not, explain myself properly. Or perhaps you continue to deliberately misunderstand me, for God knows what reasons I can't even say?

JPJ: "I was attempting to acknowledge Chet's point about UMCs hiring working-class women to do the dirty work; while also, and at the same time, critiquing his notion that 'womens' work' should be done for free in some putatively 'private' realm."

I hope I clarified above, that *I* don't feel it's acceptable for me to have someone else do that work for *me*, and that I also don't think it's acceptable, regardless of whether I pay them. And that I've lived that set of rules in my own life pretty stringently. Yes, at some cost to my own standard of living, but then, that's the point, isn't it? So, moving beyond that, your other words are *precisely* what bothers me about "domestic servants".

I return to what JPJ wrote: "UMCs hiring working-class women to do the dirty work". Substitute "people" for "women" (b/c I wouldn't be any more comfortable with a male cleaner) and that's the thing that I find problematic, and JPJ's formulation is succinct and to-the-point.

dairy queen: regarding takeout, and the oppression of restaurant workers, all I'll say is that I view the many, many forms of oppression that come with "markets outside the home" as distinct from the things that happen inside a home, and if we're going to go to "restaurant workers are oppressed", I don't see how we don't end with all of us never buying produce, b/c "farmworkers are oppressed", and on thru all the forms of work. I'm trying to draw a line here, and that line is around my home.

Also, you described having someone come in to help (clean, whatever) after your partner's health problem. I would say that this is precisely the sort of case that *justifies* having domestic help. And a society where that was available to all members, is necessarily going to be a society where UMC people cannot simply get such help because they want it: their taxes will be higher, in order to pay for the provision of such help to those who truly deserve it.

This work is so undignified, only my wife should do it.

In our utopia, well, we wouldn't even need to pee, but until then, if you treat the people working in your home as human beings, and pay them well, you're not harming anyone, and it doesn't matter why you're doing it. We do it because my wife likes a clean house and I don't like to clean. But if I'm making money and not getting any time back, what am I doing?

ogged: "This work is so undignified, only my wife should do it."

That isn't what I said. More like: "This work is so undignified, I should not ask someone else to do it for me, unless I am literally unable."

UMC (and for this purpose, anybody who can afford a cleaner is one) people like to believe they're treating their domestic servants well, when in fact, they aren't. But hey, it's the market, whaddayagonnadoooooo? And also, sure, in order to not have to live with that guilt, I just live in a dustier-than-I'd-like house. I'm not asking anybody else to make that trade.

i'm now thinking of that marvelous bus ride in i know where i'm going and i think i'll watch it again over the long weekend. always an excellent choice.

I get the discomfort. I know that several of our housecleaner's clients ghosted her during the pandemic. I also know that we and a couple of other clients kept paying her more than her regular monthly wage throughout the pandemic, without asking for any cleaning in return. Pretty sure she, the primary earner for an undocumented family, would have been fully hosed if not for the relationships she built out of the work she does. Like I say, see people as human beings, and there's no essential harm.

ogged: "see people as human beings"

To return to the OP, when one adopts this attitude regarding these cleaners who have stolen swistle's family's money, the proper response is to raise their wages enough, and make their working conditions good enough, that the trustworthy cleaners she finds, will not want to bring along others. As I noted in one of my first comments, that's the answer here. They're humans, they're probably not earning enough from all their clients together. Because for every person like you, there are a ton who pay their cleaners what the market will bear, and when those cleaners are undocumented, it surely means "below a living wage for a typical American".

One of our wedding presents literally was a thousand dollars in cash (twenties, in an envelope). I kept it in my coat pocket throughout the reception.

"When my mom visited, she tried to do so, and we had a little bit of an altercation when she persisted and cleaned my bedroom against my express wishes. She'd come to visit to go to a Springsteen concert with all of us, and I was so angry that she'd disobeyed my express rules (right down to putting a sign on my bedroom door barring her cleaning it) that I didn't go to the concert and didn't speak to her for a week."

This is, to be frank, nuts.

"until then, if you treat the people working in your home as human beings, and pay them well"

Sometimes they steal anyway.

134: paid vacation too.

150: Yes, it is. Though I was pretty pissed when my i -laws took it upon themselves to wipe down some framed pictures with ammonia-based cleaners without asking.

Having a housekeeper is bad enough, but you really want to know what makes you a monster? Life insurance.

To be serious for a second, Chetan, the dispute is really over the embedded accusation that Swistle (and the rest of us) pay our housekeepers exploitative wages. I believe that I'm sensitive this and pay her enough that she works for us because she's making great money for a short time period. But you do not have to trust me on this, of course.

155: As long as you're contributing to social security and paying for unemployment insurance, it's ok. If there were a way for her employers to make a pre-tax contribution. To health insurance - in the absence of universal coverage - it's ok.

Not contributing to social security and claiming that the cleaner is an independent contractor would make you a moral monster.

*I knew someone who wanted just cash but then she had a stroke and her social security was really limited.

Paying employers' side social security for someone who works for you two or three hours a week isn't how the system works in any other context. For a full-time employee, yes, but a housecleaner really is an independent contractor.

Which means that a civilized amount to pay should be at a
rate that accounts for all the benefits the cleaner needs to be paying for themselves, but each customer can't separately act as if they were a full-time employer.

This is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with housecleaning as a career. You can set your hours, you can turn it into a business. It seems obviously better than waiting tables, and no worse than the male equivalent of "handyman" work.

There may be particular issues around how self-employment is handled or around undocumented labor, but the idea that cleaning is somehow unusually undignified work is utterly ridiculous and honestly misogyny.

This reminds me of an episode of Leave It To Beaver where they fired their housekeeper for stealing liquor but it turned out that Theodore was stealing the liquor to use it to raise an alligator in the toilet tank. The parents found out, went to apologize, and she shot at them before being killed by a police sniper.

160: They don't make TV shows like that anymore! I blame Cancel Culture.

Paying as an "independent contractor" isn't something you decide unilaterally. Over $2200 per year and the IRS is going to expect you need to pay the taxes. And yes, one can find licensed, bonded independent contractors, or pay someone $200 for a few hours work per month to stay under the limit. The real issue is the "services" where the cleaner doesn't get the money.

And no one seems to wring hands over lawn care services, which can be similarly exploitive or well-compensated depending on the arrangement. But mom isn't supposed to do the lawn.

Honestly, the acting was pretty wooden and the production values for shit.

Because it was the 50s, they could only show the tank of the toilet and not the bowl.

159 seems right to me.

I can't go all the way there. I don't think hiring cleaners is wrong, but I think it being in the home does make it special and kind of strange. The possibility of theft issue is emotionally and socially weird -- most of the time, when someone is in your home, taking thoughtful precautions to make sure they don't steal your stuff is insulting and hostile (because mostly people aren't in your home unless there's a personal relationship). With housecleaners, not doing that is naive and kind of dumb. Cleaning up a dirty toilet while interacting with the person whose waste it is, who didn't want to clean it themselves, also an emotionally weird position.

I don't think it's wrong, but I'm not prepared to say it's no different than being an auto mechanic.

What if you pee in your car?

Contractors also often work inside the house. I agree that's a weird thing, but it's not totally unique.

And of course most cleaning jobs are in commercial settings. Obviously we're not going to not have cleaners at office buildings. So it can't be that cleaning shit specifically can't be a job. I guess in offices you mostly get to not interact with the people, but is that really that big a difference? What about dorms with shared bathrooms?

I've heard people talk about an I think Harvard thing, maybe in the past only, where kids on financial aid got work-study jobs cleaning the dorms they lived in with their rich classmates who didn't have to clean, as a really unpleasant enforcement of social hierarchy. So, yeah, I think there's something emotionally special about cleaning up living quarters after someone who doesn't share the cleaning burden in general.

I feel like you'd want a denser liquid than alcohol.

There are plenty of contractors that work in the home and no one finds it weirdly intimate for an office building to have janitors. It's just that cleaning is supposed to be done by the mom, with maybe some "help" from dad and kids so it's suddenly weird to pay for it in the house. It's making the costs of free labor apparent.

(See also: why having my kid attend preschool is being "raised by daycare" but the kids in her all day preschool who have stay at home moms are "getting necessary socialization" because "moms need me time, too!"
Apparently the magic of socialization disappears if mom earns money while kiddo is in school.)

I'm mostly with you -- I don't mean to go further than that there's something emotionally weird about it even in the absence of "Mom should do it out of loooove." Single men like Chetan perceive it as weird. But I don't think that should be a bar at all, just something to recognize when you're thinking about how to treat people.

169: Yes, that was a Harvard thing. But I think there's a big difference between classmates who you socialize with and someone who you just briefly interact with to pay them. Housekeepers and their clients are basically strangers.

157 and 158: My parents had a cleaner who came one day a week, and they hired a payroll company before that. For a long time we did not have anyone. Years Before that we had a lovely woman who cleaned my grandmother's place too, and when my grandmother went away on vacation, she would pay her for the day and we would have her come twice a week. Everyone had a single day. She wanted cash, and I think it was a mistake not to treat her as a per diem employee, because she certainly was not set up as a proper independence contractor.

And again, restaurants. That's also poorer people cooking food, serving it to you, and then cleaning up after you because you didn't want to do those things. Is there something not great about it, sure, but it's just normal capitalism stuff. And in a restaurant they also have to be friendly and attractive while they do it. Cleaning you get to do alone and you don't have to pretend to like anyone while you're doing it.

173: Depends. Often not. It can be kind of feudal and more intimate. Certainly my grandmother got Christmas gift for her house cleaner's kid.

I remember going to someone's house for Easter, and her housekeeper person was there to help out fir a big dinner. One of the guests made sure to drive her home, because it was later. I'm not sure people would bother with that in an office environment, but even though it was paid, they were treating her as part of the family.

Harvard Dorm Crew was weird. Freshman dorms were cleaned by professional staff. I did dorm crew one year after exams, because that's what you had to do to get reunion jobs. During the year though, people were paid to clean a certain number of bathrooms per hour, and they did it pretty quickly. I'm sure that somebody cleaned the bathroom in our suite at some point, but we cleaned it ourselves too, but maybe less often than we otherwise would have needed to?

Cooks don't have to act like they like anyone. Or at least if they do, they're really bad at it.

172:. Yeah. I'm just a little salty about the idea that it's fine for me to pay someone to cut down tree branches to save shiv some labor without him having to justify it beyond "it's a pain in the ass to haul out the chainsaw and I wanted to work on other projects today" but having someone dust and vacuum requires a papal dispensation and/or proof of disability. In conclusion, fuck the patriarchy.

You know who actually deals with your shit, rather than clutter and dust? Plumbers. Not a job the "I would never pay for..." crowd typically includes in their squick (not singling out Chetan here; this is a common discussion). There's a lot of reifying of gender and caste norms in these moral dictates.

175: some of that stuff is pretty problematic, though. I went to a no-tipping restaurant in San Francisco, and it was so nice. I don't remember if there was a cover charge or if the prices were just higher. The staff were perfectly pleasant and helpful, but they did not seem to feel the need to be obsequious. Polite should be fine. You shouldn't have to pretend that you are over the moon about your job.

I did the cleaning crew at college after the year was done. The deal was that you'd get paid but also get to stay for free during senior week (if you weren't a senior) -- parents and families could rent dorm rooms for graduation so they had to be turned over quickly. (Staying in a dorm for graduation is weirdly exciting for parents and younger siblings!)

I do fix our toilets. I installed a new one with only my bare hands, a rachet, a wrench, a wax ring, and a screwdriver.

I know we had this discussion probably 15 years ago. It might be funny to go back and see how our attitudes have...evolved now that we have kids and more money.

Ha, it was just me, Labs, and baa.

Reading this thread I find myself in full sympathy with Jane. I'm also fresh off the memories of having to clean the toilets at my own house (which I had not lived in for 15 months) when my terrible ex finally got kicked out. I was DEEPLY resentful of having to clean up his poop, but it needed to be done because I was having contractors and my real estate agent through the house and I know they would be judging ME (and undervaluing the house) if it was filthy.

After that first quick clean, I hired professional cleaners to do the whole house, because it was about to go on the market. By that point it was empty of furniture, so easier to work around. They charged me $500 and I paid them $600. I would have paid twice that without batting an eyelash.

At this point I'm not sure I'll ever live with anyone again, but if I do the bathroom-cleaning will be negotiated beforehand and probably conducted by a well-paid third party. I have spent way too many years of my life assuming good faith on the part of other adults that has not paid off, and I am never again going to clean up another fully-able adult's poop.

Reading this thread I find myself in full sympathy with Jane. I'm also fresh off the memories of having to clean the toilets at my own house (which I had not lived in for 15 months) when my terrible ex finally got kicked out. I was DEEPLY resentful of having to clean up his poop, but it needed to be done because I was having contractors and my real estate agent through the house and I know they would be judging ME (and undervaluing the house) if it was filthy.

After that first quick clean, I hired professional cleaners to do the whole house, because it was about to go on the market. By that point it was empty of furniture, so easier to work around. They charged me $500 and I paid them $600. I would have paid twice that without batting an eyelash.

At this point I'm not sure I'll ever live with anyone again, but if I do the bathroom-cleaning will be negotiated beforehand and probably conducted by a well-paid third party. I have spent way too many years of my life assuming good faith on the part of other adults that has not paid off, and I am never again going to clean up another fully-able adult's poop.

181: my Father in law was kind of shocked by somebody entertaining and having someone clean and serve. I think it was because he knew that the wife was a stay at home spouse who did not work outside of the home. I didn't get why that bugged him, and I think he mellowed out over time. But he would have been disturbedby some guy getting a pay check who wasn't putting in a solid day of work too.

158/158: Thanks for that, LB. i looked this all up a few years ago and satisfied myself that our (self-employed, incorporated, legal citizen) cleaning lady didn't require any withholding and just had a moment of "oh, no, have I utterly dropped the ball?!"

For what it's worth, we have a cleaning lady. No kids, able-bodied, no "good" reason. AJ did all the cleaning before. (We share laundry, but I don't count that as cleaning.) She's a high school classmate of the step-in-laws. She was a stay at home parent whose marriage fell apart, and she's built a business for herself (and her kids, whom she employs as needed). We decided we'd rather spend the time on home improvements rather than things like dusting and making beds. (So, we're spending on cleaning but saving on plumbers/contractors/etc.) We're not especially messy, so it's not an especially bad gig. I feel slightly ickier about getting pedicures than I do about having a house cleaner in terms of paying someone for somewhat intimate labor. Then again, we're never home when our cleaner is - I see her in person maybe twice a year when I'm late for work and she starts a little early.

My grandmother's assistants stole quite a few things over the years. My aunt pulled everything she couldn't bear to lose but figured the rest was the cost of not having to personally take care of her mother. She could have puta lot of energy into loss prevention, but the truth was that the agency didn't pay well but the helpers were kind and very pleasant, and she wasn't going to need to digure out what to do with a bunch of inherited items. I was surprised how much silver (candlesticks, serving dishes) and jewelry (not, like, diamonds, but things like a big topaz brooch) remained at the end. The weirdest theft was her sewing machine. The only one I'm a bit sad over was my grandfather's childhood marbles (I have some of them, but not the best ones that were in a glass display jar.)

Friends who've worked janitorial/custodial type jobs have generally liked them fine - like UPETGI says, the pay is decent, work isn't backbreaking, and there isn't generally as much "ick factor" as you'd generally think. I suspect some places like assisted living communities are kind of rough, but that's what gloves are for . . .

and just had a moment of "oh, no, have I utterly dropped the ball?!"

ME TOO.

ME THREE.

I worked as a cleaner for quite a while.

Initially in a mental hospital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Scottish_National_Hospital which was definitely an experience and had its dangers. I also worked as a cleaner in a high school for several years.

Like ydneW says in 188.last, it was mostly fine. The jobs were unionised and paid OK. It was slightly better than bar work or retail, which was what most of my peers did. The job was physically harder work, as it involved things like dragging floor polishing machines around, and sometimes cleaning up after building work. But it was fine. The people I worked with were nice enough, and it mostly felt like a perfectly dignified way to make a living.

It did leave me with a life-long distrust of teachers, though. Teachers are shits.* I was regularly shocked at the state they'd leave the place in. Rotten milk all over the floor? Sure. Furniture literally knocked over so that in order to clean the room I had to spend a lot of time lifting chairs, moving furniture, etc Sure. The teacher who was the worst culprit for that made a formal complaint the one time I forgot to empty her bin, but regularly left her classroom looking like a herd of wildebeest had stampeded through it.

I've had MUCH shittier jobs, though. I'd take that over working in a service industry job or a call centre, any day of the week.

* and I say that as someone whose best friends (literally) are mostly teachers.

My mum worked as a domestic cleaner and an office cleaner for most of my childhood, too. She had a very friendly relationship with the woman whose house she cleaned, and as far as I can tell, it was a mutually respectful friendship. Looking back, in my head they were rich, but, actually, she was a teacher who taught speech therapy in a school for the deaf, and they lived in a small 2 bedroom house.

just to go all in on confirming everyone's conviction here that i'm irredeemably annoying - i repeat and extend my assertion that in our current system as it exists now *in addition* to working for systemic change there is actual good to be made present by comfortable people spending a premium that they can afford to employ & treat respectfully housecleaners, gardeners, tailors, dressmakers, nannies, handypeople, etc. and paying fair prices for food grown and prepared by people who are fairly paid & treated with respect. the latter may be more challenging to locate, but to be honest if you go to your local farmers market & get to know the farmers & workers it isn't too too hard to figure out who to support and who to avoid.

i know very comfortable people who are offended when a farmer charges more for produce grown by people paid a fair wage & i don't have a great deal of respect for them. particularly when those farmers regularly top up the purchasing power of folks paying with food program tokens and offering quiet locals prices to people they know are not comfortable.

More like irredeemably correct.

And no one seems to wring hands over lawn care services, which can be similarly exploitive or well-compensated depending on the arrangement. But mom isn't supposed to do the lawn.

Eh, I came back to this thread to make the same point (despite our disagreement above, I think we are mostly on the same page on this issue?...).

It occurred to me earlier today: while I don't have a cleaner, I do hire a snow removal company (and they do landscaping and lawn care in the summer) to clear out my driveway from November to April. Wouldn't even occur to feel about guilty about hiring Budge MacNally and Sean LeBlanc to snowplow my driveway, and nobody ever tries to make you feel guilty about hiring that kind of male labour, anyway. But if it's female labour, it's supposed to be a sacred obligation, a labour of love, etc., etc.

Late to this. I've used a housekeeper most of my time here. Things would just get too cluttered if I didn't and when she comes and cleans I use the time to put away the clutter. At the beginning of the pandemic she lost all of her cleaning and babysitting clients. Not one paid her. I wasn't having her over to clean for almost a year but once a month she'd come over and I'd give her a couple of hundred dollars to tide her over (she lives with her brother who has a job here and had a roof over her head but I'd also realized she was going hungry). With high vaccination rates here I've recently had her cleaning again and more recently went back to a regular weekly schedule and rate.

"I've heard people talk about an I think Harvard thing, maybe in the past only, where kids on financial aid got work-study jobs cleaning the dorms they lived in with their rich classmates who didn't have to clean, as a really unpleasant enforcement of social hierarchy"

It's Cambridge, not Harvard - known as sizarship. But it hasn't operated like that since the century before last. Isaac Newton went to Cambridge as a sizar.

I see from the rest of the thread that it still exists at Harvard??? Apologies to LB

198: 25 years ago. Not sure if it does now. As I said the bathrooms in the Freshman dorms were cleaned by janitors. It was only the bathrooms in suites of rooms that were cleaned by fellow students. It wasn't strictly a work-study job. Those were funded and cushier and required a certain level of financial need (maybe Pell grant level?). I think it paid pretty well on an hourly basis if you were fast. There wasn't a ton of quality control, because the managers were students too.

185/6 Ugggh. Sorry to hear that it's been such a drawn-out and (literally) messy situation.

Nobody cleaned anything in my house growing up. I still remember the brown spot on the corner where the hall ran into the living room, about 4 inches off the floor, where our cat for years rubbed his cheeks.

We had a housecleaner. She came once a week and at best she moved the piles around and vacuumed the floor. And cleaned the bathrooms. I doubt she ever stole anything. But we never would have noticed, unless she stole something substantial. Like furniture or a child.

Still existed up to the pandemic, but suspended currently. Unclear if it'll come back:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/24/golemme-sweeping-dorm-crew-under-the-rug/

Speaking of colleges, cleaning, and the pandemic. We're now expected to bring chalk and markers to classrooms ourselves, and it hate it so so much. I'm just always showing up and realizing I forgot to put my marker back in my bag and now it's gone.

ME TOOOO!!

I have a pouch in my backpack for my own stash of markers and chalk, but I never remember to refill it from our own supply closet. I hate it.

What especially drives me crazy is that the janitorial staff still *throws out* markers, they just don't replace them with new ones.

The only thing that's saving me this year is that my grad class is markers, but my undergrad class is chalk. People don't take away used chalk with them, and you can make do with smaller pieces, so it's rarely a problem in the chalk room. And in the marker room grad students teach, so when I don't have a marker I just borrow one from one of my students, which is embarrassing but at least you can still start class.

At UT, the classrooms had baskets that were maybe 4"x8"x4" that hung from the corner of the chalkboard and were kept full of new chalk. It was so great because you were never even potentially worried about having to find a piece. Let's just take chalk-scarcity completely off the table. I miss that.

At the University of Dover, the walls are chalk.

you have to hold a piece of slate and etch into it?

202 don't give them the good Japanese chalk

That stuff is very nice but I'm too much of a boor to bother.

My favorite is when someone uses a Sharpie on the dry erase board.

Usually I would say I can't be bothered to get the good chalk when perfectly fine chalk just shows up in the classroom, but I gotta say I'm seriously considering switching over to the good chalk now that I have to deal with it myself. At least then there's some payoff to this stupid system, plus that Hagoromo is thicker and more likely to survive in your bag.