I'm bit of a news junky. I just love reading the newspaper. I especially enjoy the odd little news story.
Here's a fun story from today's Washington Post.
Cleaning Lady Tidies Wrong W.Va. Home
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- When Debbie Phillips tried to report a crime, police just snickered. "I told him that someone came into my house and cleaned," the president of the Putnam County School Board said. "He just laughed."
The problem wasn't that her home smelled a little fresher or looked a little tidier. The problem was that Phillips had no idea who the mystery cleaner was.
Her husband denied cleaning up the joint. So did her next-door neighbor. Everyone she asked denied responsibility.
All she knew was the rugs weren't where she had left them that morning in June. Trinkets had been rearranged and in the master bedroom, the bed was made differently.
It didn't look like anything had been stolen, but she couldn't be sure.
Nearly a month passed before the mystery was solved. Her son called her at work recently after a cleaning lady arrived at the front door.
As it turns out, her neighbor across the street, with a similar house number, the same number of rooms to be cleaned and a house key hidden in a similar spot outside, had hired a cleaning service.
"They just came to the wrong door," Phillips said.
We had something like that happend to us. When we got home from a recent trip, we discovered that someone had mowed our lawn. We asked all our friends with no luck. We got a clue from a next door neighbor who said that she saw what looked like a professional lawn service truck at our house.
A few weeks later the mystery was solved. The people who put in our new lawn last year, also do weekly lawn service. When they were in the area servicing other customers, they noticed our lawn needed to be mowed. So they mowed our lawn hoping to drum up more business.
We tried out the lawn service when our lawn mower broke. We cancelled it a few months later after a "problem." We returned from another trip and found that the sprinkler system for the back yard had been left on after their last visit. The sprinklers had run for days. Unfortunately, the neighbors didn't notice. Our water bill that month was about $170. It is usually $30 or less.
So we went out a bought a new lawn mower which cost about as much as the water bill, and now my oldest daughter mows the lawn. She's a lot cheaper than the lawn service anyway.
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Related Tags: lawn mowers, domestic services, yard work
6 comments:
Did you make the lawn service pay for the wasted water?
No, I didn't. They were a small family business. We told them that we wanted our children to do the work, which was true. The money that we budgeted to pay them is now going to be used to pay for clarinet lessons for our daughter.
I sort of felt guilty about hiring them in the first place. We could technically afford it, but it wasn't a good use of our recources.
It is important that we give our children opportunities to work. I don't want my children to catch "affluenca."
Most families who hide keys hid them in similar places, and most burglars know where those places are.
Never hide a key, it's an invitation to crime.
We leave a key with the neighbors and Henry's parents instead. Of course it is pretty easy to pick the lock anyway.
Someone cleaning my house would be such a dream come true!
Love the house cleaner story.
My grandmother saw a landscaping company cleaning up her next door neighbor's leaves on one fall day. She mentioned it to the homeowner and said it looked very nice. The problem is the company did it without her consent. They then wanted $200 for the job. The homeowner refused to pay (she always raked the leaves up herself). The price was ridiculous as the yard was not even 1/8 of an acre in size. The company fought her on it for months, and lost.
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