Clean Freak

My wife and I were fired today -- not from our jobs; by our cleaning woman. Why? Apparently we were just too much trouble to please. We had the audacity to ask for certain things to be addressed -- specifically the blinds and ceiling fans -- that she wasn't willing to do, despite her initially agreeing to do them.

But that wasn't the impression we got when we hired her. Actually, the first impression we got was that we returned home after the initial cleaning to find that she had broken our house. Okay....just the bathroom. The door to the powder room has an extremely tight tolerence (like the thickness of a dollar bill) between it and the sink. She somehow managed to inadvertantly body-slam the sink and pull it out of its mounting that held it flush with the wall.

So now the door hits the sink every time it's opened. She denied it at first, but then admitted it. Don't worry, I'm bonded. Fine. We agreed that we'd try to take care of it, but let her know if we weren't successful -- at which time her bonding would come into play.

In any case, she told us at the outset of our brief relationship, Just let me clean the way I clean. I promise you'll be happy. Well...she continued to do things that we felt were unnecessary while leaving incomplete the couple things that were important to us. Were we out of line? It's not like she was doing us any favors. We were paying for this service. Shouldn't we feel free to slightly tailor the service to our situation?

"No", it seems, is the answer. Although she had asked us to leave notes with any special requests, those notes -- although, I presume, read and understood -- were never acted upon. So when she called to change the cleaning day from Thursday to Friday for this week, my wife called her back and left a message that we needed to discuss the items that weren't being addressed.

That's when Tina's sister (yes, the Putzfrau's real name is Tina) called my wife and informed her -- rudely -- that our business relationship had reached an end. Though she didn't say in so many words, the jist was that we're too much trouble and we make unreasonable requests. Say what? "Is this how you want to handle this?", my wife asked Donna (Tina's sister who we didn't even know existed before she made the phone call that Tina wouldn't).

And now we're Putzfraulos. It's likely we would have released her anyway since we were paying for service that didn't satisfy us, but the fact that she left us in a lurch the day before she was to clean for us compelled me to take up the mantle of Instant Karma.

I called Tina and left her a message (she rarely answers her phone) that we would now like her to take care of the bathroom sink that she savaged. She's bonded, she broke it, she admitted it, and now she needs to make it right. I'm not sure just how far I'm willing to take this. I know a couple guys that could probably fix my sink in an hour and charge me nothing but dinner, but I feel like rattling her cage a bit for the crime of child-like behaviour and unprofessionalism.

Whether she steps up and does the right thing or plays duck and cover remains to be seen. In either case, we'll be screening a bit more carefully the next cleaning service we let into our home.