Could you sub-contract your entire life? At least the shitty parts. Someone to do your laundry. Someone to clean up the dog poop after the winter snows melt away leaving a yard o’ turds. Someone to shovel the driveway or cut the grass. Someone to go to the movies to watch romantic comedies with your wife. When is the money worth it?
We used to have a person to come in every other week to clean the house. Man, did I feel guilty. Not about the rings in the toilet but about the money. It was $75 for three hours. The house would sparkle. It would smell good. For a brief time you would forget that you had a dog as the dog hair disappeared and that weird wet dog/poop on the paws smell evaporated. It was nice and yet for months I kept our housekeeper as a secret from my parents.
Cleaning house made my mother crazy. She worked full time so Saturdays were her day to catch up on cleaning the house. Unfortunately my brother and I took the full brunt of the madness that went along with the whirling dervish that was my mother on a cleaning mission. My father worked on Saturdays and he knew we were in for it. He would look at us as he left with eyes of sympathy. Maybe they were eyes of relief. Better us than him.
My parents recently got a cleaning lady. It was a bit of a waste because my mom would clean the house before the maid got there. “We don’t want her thinking that we are living like pigs over here.” When we had a cleaning lady we would straighten up abit but the majority of our cleaning was done by her. Was it worth it?
Our cleaning lady found another job. She referred us to someone else but we have yet to call her. We are cleaning our own house. Like Chris Rock would say, “You’re supposed to clean your own house.” That is an extra $150 a month. That is $1800 a year.
The question that begs to be asked is, “How much is your time worth?” The time that is now spent on cleaning, how much is it worth? What would I be doing instead of cleaning? Is the money worth the frustration of scrubbing the toilet?
I like a clean house. There is also a certain pride you take in your house. Point blank, there are just certain things in life that suck. Vacuuming is one of them. It would be arrogant of me to say that the time that I spend dustbusting is wasted because I was writing the great novel of the new millenium or I was sequencing DNA. I still have time for those things.
I miss that feeling of walking into a squeeky clean house. At this point the cleaning lady is on the shelf until we are in the black or our bathtub turns black.
Do you have a cleaning lady? Could you give it up?
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