Maggie is driving me crazy. We have three hours to clean a monster house north of Toronto. We spend 2½ hours on the kitchen because the client has requested a "deep clean." So Maggie is scrubbing each greasy slat of an entire wall of California shutters -- and wants me to clean everything else.
With 30 minutes left, the client returns. "It's okay to go over a little," she says grudgingly. We speed-vacuum 4,000 square feet of hardwood and whip through the rest of the house. Thanks to Maggie, Maid-It-Up Maid's best cleaner, we do a spectacular job. (All names have been changed.)
But I feel lousy because I'm dehydrated. Maggie feels lousy because we've taken so long. She undercharges the client by 80 maid minutes.
"Keep the change," the woman says. It amounts to a 10-cent tip each.
The client then leads us to an elderly relative's nearby condo. We're starving, so I insist on a five-minute lunch break. I split my ham sandwich with Maggie, who didn't have time to pack a lunch. We dine in the snow and haul our gear up to the condo.
We clean for nearly three hours, but Maggie charges for two. In a fair world, the client and her relative would say: Wait, we owe you more. But neither says a word. Instead, the elderly relative makes us mop her laminate floors all over again, this time with the grain so the streaks don't show.
As I drive us home to Scarborough, I'm mad. Maggie is silent. I tell her people are taking advantage of us. But I have a plan. Next week, she can remain in charge of quality control. I'll be in charge of time. Little do I know my perfect plan will undo us both.
In the new movie Friends with Money, Jennifer Aniston plays a teacher who becomes a maid. It's laughably unrealistic. She borrows a client's battery-operated vibrator, steals a $75 jar of face cream and doesn't lock up when she leaves. The only toilet she scrubs is already clean. The real howler is she never looks tired.
But one angle is dead-on: her low self-esteem. She lets a client knock down her fee. When her date hits on someone else, she picks up the cheque. She later lets the jerk tag along on a clean and, when he asks for a cut, gives it to him.
I heard the audience groan in disbelief, but my fellow maids really are like that. Like Ms. Aniston's character, their self-esteem is in, well, the toilet. Perhaps because we deal with dirt, we're treated like dirt. Our 10-cent tip wasn't the lowest. That same woman once gave us a six-cent tip. A few give us $5, but three out of four don't give us a penny.
For this, we endure psychological warfare. Some clients get hysterical if they find a hair -- their own hair, of course -- in the sink. (Trust me, we cleaned it; the hairs materialize from nowhere.) One client left booby traps for us, hiding coins or fluff balls under the bed or sofa.
Like serfs, our time is presumed to cost zero. One maid told me that a client kept her waiting -- unpaid -- for half an hour outside a downtown townhouse. "We're all sleeping," the woman snapped.
Some clients are nice. At the end of one horrific clean, the client brings us take-out chai lattes and cookies. A teacher on maternity leave makes us a tea. A few introduce themselves when we tell them our names. But in my month as a maid, only two clients protest when we drop our coats on their unswept floors.
"You don't have to put it there," says one young man, opening the closet. While his wife makes dinner, he snuggles his infant daughter. "I'm making coffee," he says. "Would you guys like some?"
