I spent yesterday morning cleaning, because my cleaning lady was coming. Or should I say my cleaning guy and gal? -- the hip twenty-somethings from the eco-friendly cleaning service Green Clean Maine I hired recently to clean our house. I must say, there are so many reasons I don't like my cleaning people -- I think of them as the James Franco and Anne Hathaway of the cleaning world, doing a thankless job in front of an unappreciative audience. (Just to be clear -- this is nothing personal -- they're really quite polite and friendly young people.)
First there's the cost. I pay them $100 every two weeks to mop the floors and dust the windowsills and scrub the tub, a rate that comes out to about $35/hour/cleaning star. I know they're not pocketing that since they are employed by a real business with a company van, an office, and a boss, but from the purchaser's perspective -- that would be me -- it's a pretty impressive rate of pay for the simple labor they perform.
Then there's this cleaning before the cleaning issue. You may wonder why this is necessary, which would prove that you have never paid someone else to clean your house -- or that you're my friend Lynn, whose house never ever has looked like it needed to be cleaned, even in the midst of a fifteen-person dinner party. But Lynn's house is not my house and after two weeks of Kanha, Theo, and I living our normal lives in our house with too many walls and no closets, the interior looks like fifteen dinner-partiers were here too -- they took their coats off, ate a good meal, read a few magazines and a book or two, helped Kanha with her homework, and even took a quick roll in our beds, and left all of the evidence behind and none of it where I thought it was supposed to be. (Looking around, I'd imagine they'd report it was a very good party.) As a result, in order for James and Anne to be able to get to the floors and shelves and table tops to clean them, I must pick up the mess.
Then, once I've completed the unveiling of as many surfaces as possible, I must vacate my own house. If I had a job, with an office and a boss (even without the company car), this would not be a problem -- I would trip out the door over the pile of shoes, past the pills of dust, away from the streaks of dirt, drop Kanha at school, do my productive day of work, and come happily home to a shiny clean and and oh-so-so environmentally correct home. But I have no office other than the one in my bedroom, and that needs to be cleaned too. Moreover it's unnerving to hang out and see, out of the corner of one eye, Anne scrubbing my soap scum off the bathroom sink or James wiping up last night's cheese crumbs from the counter. The company's environmental bend assuages just a tiny bit of my liberal guilt over having someone else clean up my mess -- there's plenty left for me to wallow in. So I make up an errand or two and head out for an hour and a half and try to feel more productive than penitent.
Yesterday my timing was slightly off. Anne and James were just finishing up when I got back from the post office and grocery store and vacuum shop and pharmacy -- I couldn't come up with anything else needing doing -- so I came in and let Theo out while they were donning their rain boots and loading up their jars of no chemicals cleaning solvents. I turned away for a minute as they headed out and Theo, in the unpredictable way of all dogs, came racing back in, tracking every drop of rain water and dirt that could be contained in four little dog paws across the beautiful and formerly very clean floors of our house. I'm thinking of just calling the fifteen partiers back over right now -- and perhaps Anne and James will want to come too...
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