Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA by Barbara Ehrenreich Page A

do a room or a hallway twice. Dusters get the most complete biographical overview, due to the necessity of lifting each object and tchotchke individually, and I learn that Mrs. W. is an alumna of an important women's college, now occupying herself by monitoring her investments and the baby's bowel movements. I find special charts for this latter purpose, with spaces for time of day, most recent fluid intake, consistency, and color. In the master bedroom, I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years—and I wonder what the child care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there's been some secret division of the world's women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits to show she's advanced to the breeder caste and can't be sent out to clean anymore.
    It is hotter inside than out, un-air-conditioned for the benefit of the baby, I suppose, but I do all right until I encounter the banks of glass doors that line the side and back of the ground floor. Each one has to be Windexed, wiped, and buffed—inside and out, top to bottom, left to right, until it's as streakless and invisible as a material substance can be. Outside, I can see the construction guys knocking back Gatorade, but the rule is that no fluid or food item can touch a maid's lips when she's inside a house. Now, sweat, even in unseemly quantities, is nothing new to me. I live in a subtropical area where even the inactive can expect to be moist nine months out of the year. I work out, too, in my normal life and take a certain macho pride in the Vs of sweat that form on my T-shirt after ten minutes or more on the StairMaster. But in normal life fluids lost are immediately replaced. Everyone in yuppie-land—airports, for example—looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs. The eyeliner I put on in the morning—vain twit that I am—has long since streaked down onto my cheeks, and I could wring my braid out if I wanted to. Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.
    When I can find no more surfaces to wipe and have finally exhausted the supply
of rooms, Maddy assigns me to do the kitchen floor. OK, except that Mrs. W is
in the kitchen, so I have to go down on my hands and knees practically at her
feet. No, we don't have sponge mops like the one I use in my own house; the
hands-and-knees approach is a definite selling point for corporate cleaning
services like The Maids. “We clean floors the old-fashioned way-on our hands
and knees” (emphasis added), the brochure for a competing firm boasts. In fact,
whatever advantages there may be to the hands-and-knees approach—you're closer
to your work, of course, and less likely to miss a grimy patch—are undermined
by the artificial drought imposed by The Maids' cleaning system. We are instructed
to use less than half a small bucket of lukewarm water for a kitchen and all
adjacent scrubbable floors (breakfast nooks and other dining areas), meaning
that within a few minutes we are doing nothing more than redistributing the
dirt evenly around the floor. There are occasional customer complaints about
the cleanliness of our floors—for example, from a man who wiped up a spill on
his freshly “cleaned” floor only to find the paper towel he employed for this
purpose had turned gray. A mop and a full