Demitasse Set

Day 287: Demitasse Set

"Does Ysabel follow your blog? Are you going to talk about unwanted gifts?" These were Rich's questions when he heard that I was getting rid of this demitasse coffee set today. Ysabel does not follow my blog, but I will not be sharing today's post on Facebook. 

Ysabel (not her real name) is our housekeeper. Her employees - who may all be related to her - clean our house twice a month, for $100 a pop. They have been doing so for sixteen years, except in the leanest of times. They have never raised their rates. When we moved from Shadford to the bigger house on Morton, I offered a $15 per cleaning increase and Ysi accepted. At this point, I'm quite certain we are paying well below market. 

Once, we forgot to leave a check for Ysi, so I dropped off the payment for her at her house, a modest, well-kept modular home in a tract housing park in Ypsilanti. There were red geraniums in a terra cotta pot on the poured concrete stoop. 

We call Ysi's staff "the Ysi's" because her business has no name, and the names of the four women who clean our house are unknown to me. I almost never see them, and on those very rare days when I do, I feel enormous pressure to get out as quickly as possible, as if I've ordered a cocktail five minutes before last call, and I'm the last customer in the joint, and the bartender and waitress are dead on their feet. The Ysi's are prompt, reliable, honest and thorough. It's a pleasant surprise to come home if I've forgotten it's an Ysi's day, because the moment I open the door at the end of the day, I feel, see, smell - I know - the house is clean. 

Nevertheless, every time they clean, we ask ourselves, "Do they hate us?" Why would they consistently flip our red Turkish area rug? Why would they throw the trash in the recycling bin, causing me to have to gulp air like an underwater swimmer, submerge my body to the waist in the giant blue bin, and yank out the foul-smelling plastic bag so I can move it to the proper bin? Why would they put a library book in a bottom drawer under a sheaf of papers? Why would they throw Sam's term paper in the outside garbage bin with the used tissues and old meat wrappers?

Years ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed with great interest. In it, the author lives entirely from the proceeds of various minimum wage jobs and writes about it. Her premise was deeply flawed because her one condition was that she would not accept roommates. As I well knew at the time (as a twentysomething recent college grad), living without roommates is a high end luxury that no minimum wage worker can afford. 

Still, the book was interesting. I was especially interested in her description of working for the housecleaning company, where she was instructed to clean without the use of water and also described cleaning other people's toilets - with their bodily effluvia - as the unequivocal nadir of wage slavery. As a person who had cleaned other people's abodes for money, I was utterly shocked by the flummery - nay, let's call it deep deceit - of "cleaning" without water. At the same time, I felt a vague contempt for Ehrenreich's namby pamby delicacy when it came to cleaning bathrooms. Clearly, she is not a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of gal. 

Still, I learned something: not everyone loves cleaning other people's houses. That's why I favor the "They hate us" interpretation. Rich, on the other hand, thinks they're just in a hurry. 

I feel guilty about paying them only $100, and getting a little unneeded, rarely used Christmas gift each year just twists that knife. And perhaps this underpayment is part of what makes them hate us. But on the other hand, who wants to offer a raise to somebody who tosses out a term paper?

It's a pickle.