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Generally speaking, any thread that starts with “Do you know anyone…” is better suited for IMHO than GQ.
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I am friends with an older actress who retains a live in housekeeper; the housekeeper’s husband is her handyman. She also has a gardener. When she visited this summer she commented that my garden looked so nice that she was entertaining thoughts on hiring me!
When I lived overseas for work, I had a full-time live-in maid and a driver.
I know a well-known rock star/musician and she has full time help. She has an assistant and also a guy who takes care of the house/shopping/cooking and she has a nanny for her two kids (she may not anymore, they’re older now. I haven’t been to her house in a few years.)
My sister in law lives in Hong Kong and has a live-in nanny/housekeeper and a full-time chauffeur.
I know lot of people. Upper middle class and up in India all have servants, usually a full time cook and housekeeper, and then some part time others.
I have friends in India who have a gardener, chauffeur and maid but they live in a compound of extended family where having help is still common. Those of her family members who reside in their own homes do not have full time help, though they may hire someone to bring packages from market to their home every week.
I know women from Australia and the U.K. who worked as nannies here in the US and my brother and sis-in-law had nannies for a couple of summers until the oldest child in the family could drive. I know lots of people who have part-time help such as a regular lawn care service or cleaning service but no one with full-time help who doesn’t need it for a medical reason.
Even lower middle class will often have part time help.
I would never spend money for a chauffeur, but a live in housekeeper would be a blessing. Maybe not live-in, maybe just full time during the day. I hate housework and would rather work more hours at my job and then pay someone else to do the housework than spend the time doing it myself. Realistically, when we’re a little better off financially, I’ll hire a cleaning service to come in weekly or bi-weekly.
I’m defining servant as someone who serves only one client, instead of, say, the cleaning person or gardener who has several regular clients.
Barring caretakers for elderly family members, I only know one family (painting clients of mine) who have a staff of five full-time people who pretty much work around the clock taking care of four children, laundry, cleaning house, outdoor maintenance such as mowing, pool maintenance, garden, snow shoveling, etc.
They’re a relatively young couple who own a monster house, his n hers Bentleys and other assorted high-end vehicles, all bought with proceeds from being high-up on an MLM pyramid [del]scam[/del] scheme built mostly with Monavis acai berry juice and some sort of magic protein weight-loss cookies. :rolleyes:
Bless their little cotton socks, it’s easy to be a bit contemptuous but they are providing employment to a few people in a shit economy (SE Michigan) and spending lots of money on stuff like plastic surgery, man-waxing, spas, expensive toys and other essentials.
Nannies and housekeepers and groundskeepers? Yup. In fact, my son is one of the few without a nanny, housekeeper, or groundskeeper.
He has a few friends with one nanny per child. One friend of his has a nanny from 7am to 7pm. There are two and part of their shifts overlap. The evening one cooks and cleans.
I would die happy, yes, ecstatic, if I had a chauffeur. I hate driving more than anything in the world, I hate trying to find parking spaces, I hate shovelling the driveway, driving on the highway, and even running up to the 7-11 for a couple of things. My late m-i-l didn’t know how to drive and technically her husband was her driver, but only if he felt like it!
I hope to hell they’re not in one of the Pointes.
The vast majority of people I know with servants are people who had them/have them overseas, where the culture is just very different and where these people who are making good money in U.S. dollars are just extremely rich by comparison to the locals.
I knew a guy who was a manager for a major energy company overseas, he was making good money but not crazy money (six-figures but lower six), and he had essentially a villa with more servants than he had family members living on site.
My grandparents were somewhat affluent and had a nanny for their children, and I know several upper middle class families with live in nannies. But that seems to be the only common full time servant anymore.
I also know people who live near a guy who is worth anywhere between $800-$2bn (most sources say firmly over $1bn these days) and he lives in the same 3 bedroom ranch house he’s owned since the 1970s, and he eats at Applebee’s 3-4 times a week. He does have a house cleaner come in once a week so his wife doesn’t have to clean the house, and a guy that mows his lawn. But I know people that make $50k/year who have a weekly house cleaner (in some places you can get bare bones house cleaners to come in intermittently for around $70/mo.), and lots of old people I know pay a sawbuck or something to a neighborhood kid or some friend of a friend to maintain their yard.
Even if you live in a McMansion, there genuinely is just not enough cleaning to be done to justify a 24/7 full time maid. You would have to almost live in a castle to have a home that, with modern cleaning tools, would need a 7 day a week cleaner on site. And then at most it’d be like one person, in the old days even a moderate sized house would require a staff to maintain, so in the 19th century it wasn’t just the fabulously wealthy who had servants but really the middle class and on up (the middle class was super small then, though, the vast majority were working class.)
Some things also just “aren’t done” anymore, for cultural reasons. I don’t care how rich you are, if you’re an American you’re putting your own clothes on in the morning. I can guarantee guys like Bill Gates do not have manservants who dress them in the morning, but 100 years ago or more no rich man put his own clothes on or even shaved himself.
While they were alive, my grandparents had a handyman and a maid of all work/companion, and my mom had 2 non-live in day maids and my brother and I had a governess [paid for by my grandparents] until I was 12.
I hate doing housework … at various times while mrAru was out to sea I traded living space in the house for housework and yardwork so I wasn’t all alone.
I knew a guy from one of the leading Houston families who’d been raised in a fully staffed house; he claimed he was 5 before he realized his mother wasn’t black. Don’t know who was live-in or came in each day, but the family had benefits set up for the staff & seemed to treat them OK.
He said that sometimes you just want to have a very light supper–but servants expect you to have a full meal in the dining room every evening. Living on his own, he had a cleaning lady come by once or twice a week. Put the dirty dishes in the washer; she would run it & put them away. Kept the kitchen pretty clean–but the night before she was expected he might leave a bit of a mess…
(By the way, the first series of the original Upstairs Downstairs is now on Netflix Streaming.)
Yup, that’s us - we’ve had household staff in Egypt, Mozambique and Indonesia. Back in the US we wouldn’t dream of it, even if we could afford it.
Here, near the Mexican border, about a third of families in the upper-middle class have full time help. They tend to be jack of all trades-- clean, cook, child care, errands. It works out to be cheaper than if you hired for each job separately.
Nope. Grand Blanc.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about the driver. I wouldn’t call him a servant, though. He is my dedicated driver, and he’s available 24 hours, seven days a week. I rather hate the arrangement.