I am a cleaner, I have been running my own business for over 30 years and living in the Home Counties means some of my clients are millionaires.
While the phrase “filthy rich” may be shorthand for wealth beyond one’s wildest dreams, to me it’s a more than accurate description. I spend my life trying to put their disgusting homes in order.
I’ve seen everything from rooms filled with dog poop to unflushed toilets, not to mention plenty of other things that turn your stomach. And I’ve learned that the more money you have, the dirtier and ruder you’re likely to be. I often say that I wipe my shoes when I leave the fancier homes I work in, not when I enter.
Let’s take some of my (now former) clients as an example: let’s call them Mr and Mrs R. The couple live near one of Britain’s top public girls’ schools, which their daughter attends. The annual fees are around £40,000.
I worked four hours a week for them for four years, but because Mrs. R clearly considered me “lower class,” she rarely spoke to me except to give me orders.
Worse yet, her house was completely filthy. Every week she would leave it looking like it was a show house and every week when she came home it looked like she had never been there. So I was starting from scratch again and never had a chance to catch up on things.
The showers were black with mold that no cleaning product could remove (trust me, I tried).
“There was one terrible occasion where I knocked on a male client’s bathroom door and he said, ‘Come in,’ and he was sitting on the toilet, staring at me without a care in the world.”
I insisted on washing his dirty dishes in the sink because I refused to even open the dishwasher door; the smell made me sick. I don’t know how I could stand it, but cleaning him wasn’t part of my job, so I just kept quiet.
I could also stand dirty underwear being left on the floor, but what really made me lose control was the day she asked me to change the sheets on the double bed. There were so many stains that I could hardly stand to look at them (I won’t go into more detail because it’s so disgusting). I resigned on the spot.
The reality is that many homes that are incredibly beautiful on the outside are beautiful for the wrong reasons on the inside.
There was a place I nicknamed “Mucky Mansions.” It was a small, stately home with two dogs and filled with cobwebbed antique furniture and threadbare carpets.
The first time I went, my vacuum cleaner ran over dog poop in the hallway; it was so dark due to the outdated lighting that it was impossible to see.
Then, when I tried to clean the kitchen floor, there was more of the same. You’d think the owner would have been desperately embarrassed, but he wasn’t at all. “Don’t worry, girl, just turn it over,” he said in a resigned voice as he proceeded to lay down newspaper to cover it, leaving me to mop around it. After that, I had to mop up a new arrangement of newspaper every week.
I was forbidden from cleaning the dorms, which was probably a good thing, since I looked around once and it looked like a hoarder’s paradise, filled with junk.
The final straw was the day one of his dogs came in with a dead chicken in its mouth and his daughter, who is in her 20s, started screaming, “Dad, the dog ate another chicken.”
Then he started a fight with his mother over a lettuce and threw it at her head in front of me.
I believe, as my mother used to say, that “cleanliness is the closest thing to holiness.” My sheets are spotless and you could eat off the floor in any room in the house… and I have two dogs.
It’s part of the reason I became a cleaner. As well as wanting to be my own boss and choose my own hours, I love cleaning and transforming people’s homes.
It gives me great satisfaction to see a messy house turned into a tidy, sparkling home with sparkling showers, spotless kitchen surfaces and fluffy cushions. I’ll never be rich, but this is how I pay the bills.
However, the dirty attitude of some clients makes working for them a misery.
Take Mrs K for example. She has more designer handbags, shoes and scarves (often still unopened in their boxes) than Harrods.
But the day I raised my prices (just £3.50 an hour) for the first time in five years, she tried to haggle. When I refused, she cut my hours from six to three, claiming she couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t a great loss for me, as she didn’t understand that I was the cleaner, not a butler or a maid.
If she had friends nearby, she wanted me to do all the work of picking them up and driving them, including serving them tea on fine china.
Meanwhile, Mrs. T is a lovely lady who is always polite, but her house is a hurricane of designer clothes strewn everywhere.
She and her husband may be able to afford expensive things, but they don’t stay in good condition for long.
I once got a lecture about the new marble bathroom floor and what cleaning products I could and couldn’t use. But now it’s ruined anyway because the men of the house (who have two children) can’t “aim accurately” and the acid has ruined the marble.
A teenage son leaves repellent tissues on his nightstand and, worse still, picks his nose and leaves the results spread on the walls of his room and in the shower.
In other areas, she’s just plain lazy. For example, pillowcases: she doesn’t bother to wash them, so she just puts new ones on top of the old ones. I counted five on one pillow!
Sometimes the situations are just plain embarrassing. I had a client who walked around topless without any shame. I once saw her walking around naked in her bedroom with the door wide open while a group of workers were busy down the hall.
And there was one terrible time when I knocked on a client’s bathroom door and he said, “Come in,” and he was sitting on the toilet, staring at me with no concern. I felt so embarrassed and apologized. Then I ran out as fast as I could. When I saw him later, he acted like it never happened.
Then there was the personal trainer for rich, bored housewives. I decided to give her bedroom a good cleaning, but her nightstand had no doors and while I was dusting, a stack of photos fell out.
I picked them up and discovered that they were photos of her in, let’s say, intimate positions.
There was no way I could put them back in the order they had fallen, so she would inevitably know I had seen them. Why didn’t she move them before I arrived?
I wouldn’t have been able to look her in the eye, so I told her that my client list was too full and I needed to cut back. I knew that once she saw the stack of photos, she would understand.
I can’t decide if people are lazy, forgetful, or just plain ignorant. Your home may be your sanctuary away from the public eye, but that doesn’t make things invisible. If you hire a person to clean for you, you’d be wise to remember that.
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