Can we have a FWP thread today, too?
Jan 28, 2015 9:32:46 GMT -5
Post by eyenigh on Jan 28, 2015 9:32:46 GMT -5
I need to complain about this but I know it's only justified under a first world problem thread. Since A was born, and as most of you can commiserate, it got increasingly difficult to find the time to clean the house. So, instead of suffering and trying to squeeze in time to do it, I decided to bite the bullet and outsource it right around the time he was about 18 months? Anyway, the first person that I got was recommended to me by my neighbor (it was a friend of hers that she's known since elementary school). She started out okay but she has three kids, lives with her parents and the dad is out of the picture for the most part. I only mention this because she seemed to have a life riddled with catastrophes and issues that started getting in the way more and more from her being able to clean my house. I was very understanding the first 3 or 4 times but, after that, I really started to lose my patience. As time went on, she was doing more and more of a rushed job and I finally let her go after she left a dumped bag of garbage on my bedroom floor. When I called her to let her know that we were going to discontinue service to save money (which I said just to be nice since she's my neighbor's friend), she literally hung up on me without even replying. Then she had someone call me to give her a reference a few days later. Seriously.
My next ones were a local service. I stressed the most important thing to be was reliability and they were all in in agreement. As most of you know, you have to pick the house up before they can clean so if someone doesn't show up, I now have to do this twice. The whole purpose of hiring someone is to make my life easier and convenient so if you start making it harder, you're useless to me. First 6 months, they were pretty good. The second 6 months, they offered me a discount to prepay for the next 6 months. Service had been good so I stupidly did this. As you can guess, everything took a dive. Like the other person, there started being bi-weekly disasters. Someone was always in the hospital or sick and there were so many reschedules, they couldn't follow it anymore and were showing up on the wrong weeks. At this point, I haven't had reliable service since October and they completely blew off the first appointment in January. Again, like an idiot, I was very understanding for the last 2 months as they called in constantly but I finally had to confront the owner on this last one. She got all offended and blamed me for all the rescheduling and told me I only had one more date left on my prepay. I keep good records and I knew I had six so I sent her all the communications (texts and emails where she called in), dates they came and didn't show and, even when she had every piece of evidence she still blamed me. So, I asked for the remainder of my visits refunded and we're done with her. Let's see how long it'll take to get a check. If I don't have it within 2 weeks of the fire date, I'm kind of prepared to take it to small claims court, although I really don't want to do that.
Ok, sorry that was long but I'm so pissed. Why is it so hard to get reliable people? I'm not the least bit particular about the cleaning itself and I think I'm pretty easy to work with. Maybe this is why I'm getting walked all over.
TL;DR: Cleaning people suck and are totally unreliable and I'm sick of having to fight to get people to show up and do the work that I paid them to do.
My next ones were a local service. I stressed the most important thing to be was reliability and they were all in in agreement. As most of you know, you have to pick the house up before they can clean so if someone doesn't show up, I now have to do this twice. The whole purpose of hiring someone is to make my life easier and convenient so if you start making it harder, you're useless to me. First 6 months, they were pretty good. The second 6 months, they offered me a discount to prepay for the next 6 months. Service had been good so I stupidly did this. As you can guess, everything took a dive. Like the other person, there started being bi-weekly disasters. Someone was always in the hospital or sick and there were so many reschedules, they couldn't follow it anymore and were showing up on the wrong weeks. At this point, I haven't had reliable service since October and they completely blew off the first appointment in January. Again, like an idiot, I was very understanding for the last 2 months as they called in constantly but I finally had to confront the owner on this last one. She got all offended and blamed me for all the rescheduling and told me I only had one more date left on my prepay. I keep good records and I knew I had six so I sent her all the communications (texts and emails where she called in), dates they came and didn't show and, even when she had every piece of evidence she still blamed me. So, I asked for the remainder of my visits refunded and we're done with her. Let's see how long it'll take to get a check. If I don't have it within 2 weeks of the fire date, I'm kind of prepared to take it to small claims court, although I really don't want to do that.
Ok, sorry that was long but I'm so pissed. Why is it so hard to get reliable people? I'm not the least bit particular about the cleaning itself and I think I'm pretty easy to work with. Maybe this is why I'm getting walked all over.
TL;DR: Cleaning people suck and are totally unreliable and I'm sick of having to fight to get people to show up and do the work that I paid them to do.