Maid and drama

The importance of maids in a household especially in a city cannot be stressed enough. If you get a good maid, you will spend each day in fear that she might leave you someday to better paying household. If you get a bad maid, you will pray to god to give you patience till you find a decent replacement. There is always some power struggle in a household where the maid and the memsahib don't see eye-to-eye and cruel fate has them on lockdown where their personal needs exceeds the desire to break free. 

Ever since my father retired and we started living a civilian life (a little over a year now), I have started to understand why this "other woman" is so important in all houses. I, however, refuse to let them walk around our house with the confidence that we would, as a family, collapse without their services.

Need I even say that all my maids have feared and/or hated me. I'm never rude with them...well, almost never, but I know how to use my words carefully to get the desired action. I'm always polite and firm and that puzzles most of them since they are used a certain amount of pleading and frustrated rude talk from other employers. And since I show no fear about them quitting and walking out, most of them are afraid that my "connections" will ensure that I'm not without a maid for long. They are partly right.

Most of my friends, wait for the time that our maid of the moment is left alone with me. Such opportunities usually come when my parents are out of town for a few days and I don't get the time to supervise the maid's work in the morning since I'm rushing to get ready for work. Invariably, a weekend or a public holiday comes along and the maid's nightmare comes true. I follow the maid as she works around the house...each furniture is moved and dust gathered, I run my finger on shelves and make them re-do the dusting and all utensils are inspected. I make sure that by the time they leave for the day, they have compensated for the shoddy work they did during the weekdays.

Some of them try to gain sympathy from you with a sob story (talks about her hungry children at home but omits to mention that they are 30 plus year old sons), some deliberately do a job poorly just to get you worked up and some test your limits till they understand how to break you. Fortunately, working women like me have an advantage here. We are so used to getting work done from difficult people that we are become almost impervious to their tricks.

For instance, one of the peons in my office has mastered the art of avoiding work. God alone knows how he got the job or what he gets paid for but I assume he's been with the organization for so long that he continues by being barely functional. If given any job, for instance, when asked to get 20 photocopies if a document. He returns after 5 minutes stating that the paper got jammed and he can not figure out what to do or the toner ran out in the printer. Naturally, we then ask him to use any other 5 printers available and he promptly disappears with the document for an indefinite period of time and in the meanwhile all one can do is sob at the desk for trusting him to do something. Some of us figured out the solution, which was to stand and instruct him on how to unclog the printer or tell him which particular printer to use. We showed patience and waited for the job to be completed by him. In some cases, we reported his misbehavior as well. Now he spends his days a avoiding us all together for as long as he can but then that's another story.

I use the same patience technique with my maids. They eventually realize that unless they do their job well, I'm going to stand in their heads the whole time. My friends like to believe that I put my maids in their place by dressing up in leather and sitting with a ready whip in my hand. I assure all of you, that is not the case. Nothing works better than seeming unaffected and being polite and firm in your interactions at the same time.

My current maid refuses the place the washed utensils in their designated places. Her excuse? That she was illiterate. I then asked her for the connection between utensils and education. Now she knows how to arrange the pots and pans. She earlier had the habit of asking me for time despite us having giant clocks in every room. I initially indulged her. When I would tell her the time, she would gasp and make a comment like "it's already been an hour (45 minutes/2 hours) since I started working?!" I then offered to teach her how to read time and also reminded her that she could save a lot of time by working faster. She now can miraculously read time by herself.

Beatles' hit song "All you need is love" would have been very different had they written if keeping the Indian maids in mind. With maids here, only patience and spine of stainless steel works.