“You have to have a thick skin”
As a housekeeper, you have to be able to multitask and have a thick skin. When I came to work on my first day, a customer looked me up and down – I wear a size 12 – and said very clearly: “We don’t do takeaway food.” I only worked for her for a couple of weeks because I didn’t like her attitude.
I had a client in the past from an older generation who, during a little chat, joked that he had to spank me. That was too much for me and I didn’t say anything back.
It’s hard working in someone’s home – it’s difficult to set professional boundaries in a home environment. If he had said that in an office, it would have been taken differently. In this case, I decided it was just his humor. As a housekeeper, you have to know when to question something and when to let it go.
As far as nightmare clients go, I guess I got lucky, but I had one client who was really stingy about the smallest things. He talked about money all the time. He lived in a house with 10 toilets and a pool, but he insisted that I put cheap hand soap in a Jo Malone bottle so it looked like he was buying expensive hand wash.
His kids had a pool party one time. He had a slush machine and when the kids left the pool area, I caught him dumping the leftovers from the kids’ cups back into the machine so they could be reused. I said, “That’s gross.”
“A customer made me lie to a neighbor and say he had stolen his Amazon package”
One day, an Amazon guy dropped off a Dyson pedestal fan at our house. That was a mistake because it was addressed to a neighbor. But my customer said, “Oh no, we’ll take that one.” The neighbor came by and said, “You didn’t get a package, did you?” And my customer made me open the door and I had to lie to the neighbor. I really didn’t like that.
Although my clients are usually very wealthy, I am not jealous of them, except for one thing. I find it frustrating when I hear them talk about making a profit on properties they own and rent out because rents are so high in Manchester and there are so many young people who cannot afford to buy property.
