I feel like some kind of 1950’s socialite complaining about how “it’s just so hard to get good help these days,” but what the hell.
I am a lawyer, and I work long hours. My husband has recently taken a regular job (at 80% - 4 days a week) after having worked from home for our whole 10-year marriage. We have two kids, ages 4 and 8 months, the baby still breastfeeding. My husband is also involved in a NASA-sponsored competition that is sucking up enormous amounts of time - it’s basically a second at least half-time job, except we put money into it instead of him getting paid (admittedly with a chance at a big payoff, but still).
So, we’re totally overwhelmed with housework. Neither of us is the best at keeping on top of it anyway. He has always done the vast majority of the laundry and dishes, and I cook. We’re so overstretched at this point that we started looking at getting some household help. We have a team of housecleaners who come in for a couple hours once every two weeks, but that doesn’t help with the dishes and laundry. He found an agency that mostly does home health care, but also advertises that they do household chores for new parents. Great, sounds like just what we need. We met with the head of the agency, and she was very enthusiastic about being able to find someone to come in for a couple of hours three times a week to do laundry, wash dishes, change beds, straighten up, etc. Cost is $22/hr, but we don’t have to deal with taxes, and they’re bonded and security checked (my husband is very paranoid about letting someone into the house when we’re not here - I’m cautious, but he’s very very cautious). We paid her a deposit and she told us she would arrange a meeting with our new helper in a few days.
A couple of days pass, and she tells us she’s having more trouble than she anticipated finding someone for us. Then she schedules a meeting, but cancels it when the employee needs to go dig her parents out of a mudslide. Another week passes, and she announces she has found us the perfect match. She certainly has some nice-looking stuff on her resume, although my husband points out that the majority of the jobs on there lasted for six months or less. But she does show up to meet us on a Wednesday night, and she seems great. Very nice, very competent. We agree that she will come back on Thursday and Friday to get started.
Thursday, we get home from work, and she hasn’t been there. She emails my husband to tell him that she totally forgot that that was the day she needed to stay home for the cable guy, but she will be there tomorrow. Husband scrambles to get some laundry done before morning since I wore my last clean pair of underwear that day.
Friday, we get home, she hasn’t been there. In an email that evening, she claims to have sent email in the morning which neither we nor her employer received, that her car had been broken into. (We don’t have her home phone number, but the head of the agency has been calling her and getting no answer.) No one can reach her over the weekend or on Monday. Not that we were expecting her to show, but we did leave her a key just in case on Monday - no luck. The head of the agency cc’s us on the email firing her.
So now we’re back to square one, and the head of the agency is pretty much admitting that she can’t find us someone after all. She has arranged a meeting with a friend of hers who has a housecleaning business who may be willing to help us. If that falls through, I have a line on a nanny placement agency that may also do housekeepers, but I don’t know if they’ll place someone in a part-time, relatively low-hours position. I’m not sure what else to do. My husband is not willing to go through craigslist or want ads because he wants the background check.
Yes, maybe we should be able to just suck it up and get the housework done ourselves, but is it really so much to ask that we be able to hire someone for this? We can afford it and are willing to pay - we just want someone who will show up, do the work, and not loot the house. Why is it so hard?