A Maid for all Seasons

Wanted: a maid to keep house when we're away and to cook us yummy meals. Sure, there are lots of wonderfully self-sufficient people who manage everything on their own without domestic help but we're in a critical position where we need one on the double.

So we've been placing ads in a local paper. No names or addresses, just our contact numbers. The responses have been frankly tragi comic. The first response came in the form of missed calls. Initially I dismissed them as crank calls but when they persisted, I called back and a young girl's voice asked if we were the people looking for a maid. Yeow, imagine looking for a job by making missed calls. Talk of cheapos.

Another caller offered a package deal. His younger sister, 16, would work for free if he could come and live with her and continue his schooling (he said he was doing his 12th). Unfortunately, we don't have room for two and the idea of feeding two extra mouths was daunting so I said nothing doing.

Finally, we took in a young boy. He said he was 17 and could do anything a girl could and that he was desperate for a placement, so we decided there were times we needed a male hand around the house anyway. He stayed for over a week but didn't quite turn out to be what we had hoped for. On his second sunday day out, he came home after the stipulated hour saying he was going to learn driving, and that was it.

Our next try was a 22 year old girl who came with her aunt. She said she'd been married with a three year old child but the husband had taken to alcohol and turned abusive so they had separated last September. She was petite with heavily black eyelined eyes and tight jeans but once she settled down, seemed quite a find. She picked up things quickly and was neat, docile and seemed to enjoy working around the house. I had begun to breathe a sigh of relief but last sunday, around sunset, she told my sister she needed to buy a packet of tobacco just up the road and never came back. After frantic calls to her aunt, we learned she had gone to her friend's house and planned to stay the night there. The next day, it all came out. She'd told her aunt we had been getting her to take care of my paraplegic sister as well and that she couldn't cope with the workload. Needless to say, we took the aunt to my sister's room to see her with her daily attendant who is actually paid well over twice the salary we pay our house maids. We learned our girl was something of a pathological liar and had been surreptitiously using our landline cordless phone late at night etc.

So now we've placed yet another ad in the papers. We're dangling a bait of 1300/- per month this time. And there have been a number of callers already. One wanted to know if she could attend Burmese language church on sundays. When we said yes, she wanted to know if we could give her the bus fare every sunday. Yeow.