The Household COO

Since sending my maid home, we have been living with just the help of my MIL’s maid.  Being quite a capable maid, she still manages to get most of the chores completed, although I now handle more of the cleaning of the baby’s stuff.  I am glad to say that emotions in the household have greatly improved.

Recently, my MIL’s maid went back to Indonesia for a month long break, leaving us without any domestic help.  At the time that we were contemplating sending my maid back, my MIL had mentioned this period was coming up.  She had asked whether I thought we could manage the household without help and I readily agreed.  That was before I realised that my idea of clean and my MIL’s idea of clean belonged to two opposite ends of a spectrum.

Now that we have been spoilt with a maid to clean up after us, it takes a bit of getting used to not having one.  My MIL who likes her floors cleaned on a daily basis and the laundry done every day lives to a standard of cleanliness that makes me appear like I live in a pig’s sty.  Not only does she clean everything more frequently than I normally do, she also adds more tasks to each cleaning process compared to what I do.

For instance, she pre-soaks all the laundry before it goes into the machine whereas I used to just soak everything in the machine and then set the machine to wash.  She would hand washes certain clothings whereas my motto is everything that can go into the machine will be washed by the machine.  She likes to wash her porch, whereas I’ve often been quite partial to the windswept look - the hubby used to wash our porch back  in our old house.

In all honesty, I don’t think I’m that filthy a person.  When I clean, I usually make sure I do a pretty good job of it.  In fact, I often felt that my bathroom stayed clean a lot longer than the one washed by my maid, although I suspect it is due to the fact that my maid would give my bathroom a cursory wipe down rather than a proper clean.  Since she would do it on almost as daily basis, I accepted it without complaint.

About the only thing that has degraded in quality since the maid went on leave is the folding of the laundry.  I honestly don’t know how the maid does it, but when she folds the clothes, they look the way they appear in a store.  Try as I might, my folded clothes never look that good.  The floors are another thing to go.  Since I never wash my floors on a daily basis, they tend to get a little bit dusty after a few days without cleaning.  Admitedly I’ve been a lot better about it compared to when we were living in our previous house.  At least I now clean once every two to three days, as opposed to once a week…

Yes, that’s the thing about having domestic help - it’s too easy to get comfortable with them around.

When the hubby and I got married, we lived in a little terrace house that had 3 bedrooms and a study.  Taking the better part of a morning to clean, it wasn’t really that difficult to upkeep the house - especially when my idea of cleaning the house mean washing the bathrooms, changing the bedsheets, cleaning the floors and kitchen once a week.  The laundry was done on an “when required” basis, meaning as long as there was a full load for the machine.  Since I didn’t have a little toddler commanding much of my time back then either, it didn’t really make sense to get a maid.  Plus, I valued my privacy and didn’t really like the idea of someone going through my things.

After the experiences my mother had shared with me, it is no wonder I’ve been wary of maids all my life.  And when you consider the way house maids are employed here, you’d probably have reservations, too.  Applying for a live-in maid here is a little like playing Russian Roulette.  With no more than a slip of paper stating personal details like name, age, religion, preferred house chores and a photograph to go by, it’s a little difficult to decide which maid would work best in your household.  Your best bet is really to spread the pieces of paper out in front of you and take a blind stab at any one of them.  If you’re lucky, you might get a good one.  If you’re not, well, hopefully she’ll do a semi decent job at cleaning your house and not rob you blind when your back’s turned.

Once I got pregnant, I finally consented to getting a maid only after much arm-twisting by the hubby.  By the end of my pregnancy (when I was 22kg up, struggling to mop the floor without losing my balance and cook dinner without burning my bump), I think I was quite ready to get a maid, too. 

There is a certain convenience and luxury to having all your dishes and laundry washed and not having to worry about cleaning up after anything that you do.  The down side is when your maid can’t be trusted - and that was unfortunately the case that we faced.  My problem was that my maid came about a week before I was due so I didn’t really have time to train her to clean my house the way I wanted things.  After my delivery, I was so busy recovering and learning how to care for the baby that I confess I pretty much left her to her own devices.  I only discovered the little things my maid would get up to some months later and then I thought that since they were pretty minor, I over looked them.

It was much later that she started to get more bold, making secret phonecalls to Indonesia without telling us, taking food that my MIL had bought to cook for dinner, doing a half-hearted job at cleaning when she thought we weren’t looking and rumaging through my things without my expressed permission.  She was getting far too bold for my liking.  It appeared she was taking advantage of the fact that I was not a strict employer which upset me.

Despite the number of warnings we had given her, the problems kept cropping up.  By this time, we had already moved back in with my MIL who also had a maid of her own.  That only made the problem worse - the two maids began fighting about seniority, coming to blows on a couple of occasions, requiring my FIL to break up the fight.  When they weren’t fighting, they were too busy gossiping to get the household chores done which put my MIL in a foul mood by the time she got home only to discover that both girls had done nothing while we were all out.

Finally deciding that the turmoil in the household was not worth the convenience of a second maid, I sent my maid home and took the penalty (since the warranty was only 6 months so I was no longer entitled to a replacement maid).  The agency suggested that they take my maid back for “counselling”, but since I had completely lost my trust in this maid, I no longer wanted her back in my house.  I had given her far more liberty than I knew most other maids to be given only to be taken advantage of again and again, so I decided enough was enough.  I told the agency as much.  Besides, I knew exactly what kind of “counselling” they offered and despite my disappointment in my maid, I didn’t wish for her to be beaten like an impudent child.

So now I am of two minds when it comes to hiring a live-in maid.  I can’t deny the comforts offered by having one, yet, I dislike the idea of not knowing whether the outsider living in my house can be trusted or not.

We have decided to dismiss our maid before her contract is up because we’re not happy with her performance.  It appears that we are required to get her to write a letter stating that she agrees to being released early.  Frankly, I’m surprised that this is a requirement since we’re the employers - don’t we have a right to terminate a contract when the service is not up to par?

It also appears that our maid is not keen to write the letter but I hope for her sake she changes her mind rather than forcing us to send her back to the agency.  I’ve been made aware that the agency uses corporal punishment for maids who have “misbehaved” with their employers.  That is a practice I don’t agree with.  Regardless of what our maid has done, I don’t believe she deserves that.  So here’s hoping she agrees to being sent home.