Cleaning Lady!

"Cleaning lady!", I holler as I unlock the door.

There was a time when I liked being a cleaning lady.  I lived in Las Vegas.  I owned my own business. I had lots of clients and those clients treated me pretty good.  I even grew large enough to have employees.  I did advertising.  I went to business lunches.  And, yes, I cleaned toilets.

That all changed when I moved to Northern Nevada.  For some reason people here don't seem to mind living in what is basically filth.  The first job I did up here, there was a shed gopher snake skin in one of  the bottom cabinets.  Why not?  There were plenty of mice to eat in that trailer.

I didn't clean many houses and I found a "real" job.  Later on I got married and I moved to a small town.  I started a new cleaning business there.

The people were okay.  They didn't tip me a full days pay at Christmas like every single one of my clients in Las Vegas did.  They gave me a basket they had gotten at work and didn't want or $5 or a tiny jar of homemade jelly even after working for them for several years.  Gee, thanks.  They give me the key to their home and they refer me to their friends and they love having someone they can trust coming into their homes and they adore me since I am good with their pets but a tip is out of the question.

I didn't feel well respected like I used to n Vegas but I could live with that.  I had a thriving little business and I was happy enough.

Then I moved down here to this area.  Every time I get a referral, it turns out to be nasty in their home.  They all have pets that pee and poop in the house.  No offense if this the type of pet you have but I have always considered it my duty as a pet owner to devise a system where the puppy learns to pee and poop outside.  I always clean up every puppy mess with doggy deodorizer.  If you can't afford doggy deodorizer, you probably shouldn't pretend you can afford a pet.

I never, no matter how tired I am, I never let dog pee or poop sit there on the floor or the carpet.  I clean it up and then I use doggy deodorizer.  If you leave any trace of the smell the dog wants to pee and poop there again.  How hard is it to understand that and just do the right thing?

Even the nice houses I clean seem to have dogs that pee and poop in the house.  Really, people shouldn't have pets.   They don't want to learn anything about these animals and they don't want to spend the time or effort it takes to train them to be good citizens.  I am not a member of some wacko pet group.  I just don't get why you have a pet if you don't want to learn about another species and how to interact with that species and what it takes to train it to a minimal standard like not pooping and peeing in the house.

All this goes double if you have a cat.

Then there is the mouses in the house issue.  Sure, we get a mouse in the house once in awhile.  We have traps and we trap them out immediately.  We don't let them stick around building nests in the cupboards.  These houses have mice running around on the counters.  On the dishes and pots and pans. There are mouse nests in the cabinets.  There are chewed open boxes of food.  Ick! That is disgusting.

On top of all of that there is the weird lack of repairing faucets that seems to go on.  The one client has had a faucet that doesn't just wiggle but has come completely loose and is just hanging by the pipes underneath on her kitchen sink for a couple of years now.  Surely, a person could find the funds to buy a faucet and pay a plumber to put it in sometime in the last several years.

Another place had a hand held shower unit that was frayed and sprayed water everywhere when you turned on the water.  I suppose that is fine if you are naked but I am wearing jeans and a T-shirt and I don't want to be soaking wet from cleaning the shower.  Ridiculous.  This went on for over a year.

At one of the places I quit cleaning,  the kitchen sink was backed up for weeks.  The guy was old but he has children that live in town and they did not step up and call the landlord for him.  He had mice, too.  Fortunately he didn't own a pooping, peeing dog like all the rest of my clients.  I did finally tell him I quit cleaning since I just couldn't deal with the mouse issue anymore.

That's my rant.  Every year for the last couple of years I have said I will clean for one more year. I also said I wouldn't clean anymore of these mouse houses but here I am heading over tomorrow to clean that darn house.  I should have told my friend I wasn't interested but instead I said I would go over and see what I could do for the nice lady.  And the lady is nice but her house is disgusting.

My one more year is half over and this time it may well be my last year of cleaning even the few houses that I do now.