Isn't this a bad time to be a flaky worker?

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?

This is the story of the decade where I live - even with the slumping economy the unemployment rate here is still at about 3% I think.

Not only is it hard to fill tonnes of positions, there are people working that have no business having a job. Retail is by far the worst - stores are dirty, clerks are surly, management is a bunch of 19 year old twats.

A co-worker’s husband called from the east coast going nuts about how friendly and clean all the retail stores out there are.

Anyhow - good luck with your search - I think finding someone to come into your home is always tricky.

Off topic: not long ago I remember you were looking for a new assistant. Did you get one that you like?

If the agency is charging you $22 an hour, is taking care of all the bonding and security, and expects also to make a decent profit, then i’d be interested to know how much of that $22 goes to the worker. It could be that you can’t get anyone reliable and competent because the money isn’t good enough.

Damn, I wish you lived here! I was laid off and am currently unemployed, and I love doing laundry, changing beds, cleaning kitchens & bathrooms - seriously!

Couldn’t a maid/housecleaning service do these types of services? Also, couldn’t you use craigslist and just do your own background check? You could call references, and pay to have a background check done. There are online services that do this.

If you happen to belong to a church, you could put an ad on their bulletin board? (The church I had belonged to used to have one which came in handy when looking for a sitter).

Maybe even check with the local college - surely there would be a student looking for some part time work?

Or maybe even a co-worker/friend with a responsible teenager to help after school and on holiday breaks?

I recently set up home care services for my aunt, and while the agency gets $22/hr, the employee is probably getting $11/hr. The home care was a full time gig, but if your situation is part time, the worker may not get sick leave, paid time off, or medical benefits. You’re not going to get interest from anyone who needs a full time job because the odds of them being able to fill in their other time with another job of the same sort are small.

House cleaning companies sound like a better bet. They have a better chance of filling someone’s schedule. Sometimes they’ll send out a team, rather than an individual, and the team will clean several different houses each day.

Yes! She’s a super-star. I really lucked out, actually. :slight_smile:

We have a house cleaning company like this. None of the housecleaners that we have been able to find are set up to come more often than once a week. They come in with a crew, clean your house from top to bottom in a couple of hours, and swoop away. Not useful for laundry - they could maybe get two loads cycled all the way through the machine in that time, and we do a lot more laundry than that in a week - and not for dishes, either. We have neither the number of dishes nor the space to store them to be able to do a massive load of dishes once a week. I don’t think the kitchen would be usable if we tried, anyway.

Your rant made me think of this:

Lazy Nation Fears Obama Will Create Millions of Jobs

This is insane. I think it might be worth it to put an ad in the paper or at the college and do your own background check.

I just read a thing on CNN’s website, in their column about job hunting woes. There’s these 23-year old twins who job hunt as a team. They’re a package! Now color me clueless, but I’d think the chances of getting a job would be better if you didn’t market yourself as half of a pair.

I dunno…I think about “Plan B” all the time. What will I do if my gig goes away? The answer: Damn near anything.