Excerpt From Nickel And Dimed

Excerpt from Nickel and Dimed^[1]

Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo … takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been “bleeding” onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the worldwide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat to clean it.

Not that I … imagine that I am a member of that oppressed working class. My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than-average medical care, a high-protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge $400 or $500 a year. … But I will say this for myself: I have never employed a cleaning person or service…. [M]ostly I rejected the idea … because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.1

1 In 1999, somewhere between 14 and 18 percent of households employed an outsider to do the cleaning and the numbers are rising dramatically. Mediamark research reports a 53 percent increase, between 1995 and 1999, in the number of households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more….