02.12.07
Trash and the Maid
If you’re new – I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.
It’s a dirty subject but someone has to tackle it. It shouldn’t be your maid. I strongly recommend that you take out the trash before the maid comes.
Maids are in the business to make your house look nice and to clean it. They have a very strong inclination to throw out anything that is making the house look not nice. It doesn’t matter if it’s your son’s half-finished pinewood derby project or your great-grandmother’s vase that cracked & you want to get restored by Pierre the Expensive’s Fine Art Restoration Service. A Maid is not going to give a lot of thought to the question of whether or not you treasure the broken item she’s found. She’s more likely to worry that you’ll blame her for breaking it if you see it.
Worse, when she’s dusting shelves you have no guarentee that she’ll even see the pair of earrings carefully placed on a high shelf for safety. When she dusts and something goes flying, she may or may not identify the correct thing under the bed that came from the shelf. (It could just as easily have been fishing weights from my husband’s pocket, which have accumulated in odd corners.)
I know this is bizarre, and is probably why I don’t use my last name on this site, but after the maid comes I check the vacuum bag and the rest of the trash that my maid finds to throw out. I have found my great-aunt’s silver & tortise shell comb in a set of boxes one maid took out for me. I had planned to move the boxes to the attic for future panarama projects for the kids. Imagine my shock when I realized the comb had fallen from the dresser into the box when I went to retrieve them.
I have discovered that the maid service vacuumed out my kid’s drawers – including the contents of my daugther’s jewelry box – filled with expensive earrings from Grandma. Every one was there in the trash. I would have been convinced the maid was stealing. They weren’t – just rushing.
Every week I have found something I would have rather they didn’t throw away – ususally my son’s small lego toy pieces – he cannot grasp that legos should be built on a table and all the peices are needed. Not infrequently there’s more valuable stuff.
Even if you don’t go through the trash every week but have taken out the trash before the maid comes, the one week you are missing your diamonds you only have to check a small amount of trash. And you won’t blame your maid for stealing.
