Confessions of a cleaning lady

[Oddball]

Sounds like she'd prefer the simple life.

I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich.
(http://www.vox.com/2015/7/16/8961799/housekeeper-job-clients)
From vox.com.

[oldhat]

Sounds to me like she already is living a simple life, taking her kid to the beach and doing puzzles on rainy days. However, I'm not convinced that the miseries she describes among the wealthy are limited to that class. Poor and middle-class people also have bad marriages, sexual frustration, and work too much. I guess one difference is that the rich can afford a better class of drugs to palliate life's pains.

[Tammy]

I can't imagine leaving all that dirt for someone else to clean. I don't even leave the dirt for a few days until I have time to address it. I clean up after myself continuously before I leave a room.

Her descriptions made me feel disgusting. How can people let drops of blood on their bathroom floor and thick sputum in their showers. Ugh

[ApatheticNoMore]

However, I'm not convinced that the miseries she describes among the wealthy are limited to that class. Poor and middle-class people also have bad marriages, sexual frustration, and work too much. I guess one difference is that the rich can afford a better class of drugs to palliate life's pains.


The bigger the house, the more they worked to afford it, the more prescription bottles they had

yea, only the rich are addicted. Umkay. Does she really assume all the people at say AA or NA are all rich? Rich is more likely to have health insurance and maybe a doctor that will prescribe to you (even if they shouldn't). But if you can't get that, obviously that's what drug dealers are for. Those without access to any money will do more drastic things to afford their fix of course (criminality, prostitution etc.)

I don't' believe the bigger the house the more you work to afford it really. I think it's mostly having a MUCH higher salary or perhaps wealth from elsewhere (though some mansions I do marvel how anyone has that much money). Although the very poor and the quite well off (mid management and so on) probably do work the most hours. Even a middling middle class person will often be asked to put in some overtime though - cost of survival - don't expect it to buy you a big house. She can scoff at the woman who needs testosterone, but she is hardly guaranteed by the universe never to have health problems or whatever where she might need it either. I don't think you need to have a big place to hire a maid, you just need to really hate cleaning and be willing to pay money not to do it.

She'd probably fit right in with the rich really. She's already got the feeling of superiority to others down pat.

[Gregg]

For a couple decades I built houses for the rich and famous. The notion of working more to afford what we built is bunk. True, these folks spent multi-millions on their pads, but it was only a small percentage of their wealth. None of them burnt any midnight oil to get that fifth home in the mountains. Some McMansion owners do that, but they're not rich. I did learn that it is always a bad idea to make general assumptions or cave in to stereotypes. Its not possible to know who is happy and who is not by the contents of their bank account or their medicine cabinet. Life is more complicated than that. I did have enough interaction with our clients to get a decent sense of how they lived their lives. Even with that I can think of a few that seemed absolutely happy, a bigger number that didn't and even more that I couldn't really tell. I did learn that very few of them lived lives that would have made ME happy.

[bae]

For a couple decades I built houses for the rich and famous. I learned that it is always a bad idea to make general assumptions or cave in to stereotypes. Its not possible to know who is happy and who is not by the contents of their bank account or their medicine cabinet. Life is more complicated than that.

+1.

The past few years I have been visiting peoples' homes when they are least prepared to have visitors, when they have not had an opportunity to clean up and pull over the façade. Homes ranging from rotting trailers in the woods to billionaires' mansions. Generally I am there to deal with something embarrassing or scary and intrusive to privacy. My conclusion - people are all over the map, and there's not a lot of correlation between their real lives and their social image/position, at least around here.