As you’ll know, if you’ve been following our nomadic adventures, we often come to a new “home” and need to do a considerable amount of work to make it liveable. I’m surprised at the conditions some people live in without being aware that the kitchen (it’s mostly the kitchen) needs some serious work.
So, we’ve become very good at being house-elves (those helpful creatures who keep a house running without the owners being aware of what’s been done).
Recently, we’ve been in a house where the work is done for us, and it’s been a wonderful experience.
The situation we have here, is that twice a week people come in to clean and even though the owners are away, they insist on maintaining this arrangement (one which I’m glad to support, encourage and benefit from).
Possibly the most important thing to be done is removing the dog hair. One of the dogs is a breed which sheds hair. This means the floor and every other surface is covered by a layer of blonde hairs (which definitely don’t belong to Danita nor me).
So, we’re very grateful that someone comes in regularly to take care of that.
We’d be quite happy if that’s all they did. However, they do other very helpful things like ironing and dishwashing.
We’ve certainly been enjoying the fact that once a week we leave the house with a pile of shirts on the table to return later in the day to find them hanging, nicely ironed on the back of one of the chairs. This is something I think I could get used to.
The other thing that happens is dish washing. Behind the kitchen there’s a room which doubles as the laundry and kitchen washing up area. Through the week, after each meal, we stack the dirty dishes in this room and then, twice a week, we come in to find everything nicely washed (sadly they don’t put things away but I guess you can’t have everything).
While generating a warm fuzzy feeling and enhancing our sense of gratitude this has had some interesting consequences for us.
Firstly, even after a few weeks we’re somewhat uncomfortable about leaving dirty dishes – it feels like it will attract things like cockroaches. Now, I understand cockroaches are supposedly some of the cleanest insects around (they do the cleaning up, after all) and have the ability to survive a nuclear blast (a situation I’m hoping the local ones won’t need to prove) but it does leave one with a distasteful sense having these brown torpedoes running across your kitchen. Thankfully, this hasn’t happened but Danita and I are wary. I’m sure given enough time we could overcome our restrictive thinking and get used to this arrangement.
The other issue which comes up for us is that we don’t want to mess with the status quo. After all, the owners of the house have an arrangement in place with the people who do the cleaning and we don’t feel it’s our place to change that arrangement. Also, I wouldn’t want to deprive the cleaners of the sense or satisfaction they get from having done a good job.
Personally, I find ironing and dishwashing are tasks I’m happy to leave to someone else. However, when I do have to do it myself (which is quite often, because my dislike of those jobs is less intense than Danita’s) I derive a sense of satisfaction from an empty ironing basket or and empty dish-rack. Since, I experience a degree of satisfaction from this I hope that our cleaners experience something similar. If so, I feel it would be churlish of me to deprive them of their sense of joy resulting from a job well done.
I envisage them going home, after cleaning this house, feeling they’ve had a successful day and it was all worthwhile. I’m sure the cheque in the envelope also helps but I hope it’s their sense of fulfilment which keeps them coming back.
So, in the spirit of giving and providing the context for someone else to derive a sense of satisfaction from a job well done, I’ll now go and prepare dinner (not for our benefit, mind you, but so the staff can continue to experience the joy and pleasure which I expect they derive from a sense of completion) – I know, I’m such a generous chap 🙂
Sadly, we’re leaving here this week and so I’ll have to find some other way to satisfy my need to be so thoughtful.