You have hit on a common and hilarious phenomenon this time, Bobert...women who are so insecure about the impression they make on everybody else in the World that they do things like hire a cleaner, but then they get insecure about the place looking "messy", so they clean it up before the cleaner gets there! LOL! They have then established a benchmark for "acceptably clean" in their own minds and will be forced to make sure that the house is always
THAT clean again before the cleaning lady comes the next time. Whether the cleaning lady takes any note of this is a moot point, but she WILL be obliged to get the place generally even cleaner than it was when she arrived, otherwise she'd be failing to do her job, so you can be sure that when she leaves that place will be...CLEAN!!!

So, there is method in this madness. As follows...

1. The lady of the house has decided that she needs a little help to keep up on the cleaning. Fine....

2. She hires that help...fine...

3. She now gets hit with the horrid thought that the help may get the idea that she has a MESSY place! This gives her additional motivation to get moving and CLEAN IT UP, which she figures
she ought to have done anyway. Her hidden guilt feelings over not cleaning enough are somewhat eased now. All well and good.

4. She rushes around and gets the place clean enough to be acceptable for a cleaning lady. She also badgers her husband into helping, because time is running out! Hopefully, the
cleaning lady will be impressed by their efforts, and won't go all over town afterward to the bingo halls and places like that saying stuff life, "My God, you should SEE the inside of Lucinda
Baxter's house...WHAT a hideous mess! It took me 8 hours of scrubbing before I could even catch my breath! Horrifying! The woman lives in absolute squalor!" No...that will not happen.
If it did, Mrs Baxter would be forced to go on tranquilizers or move to a new town and start over.

5. Mrs Baxter can now take comfort in the fact that the load has been taken off somewhat by the cleaning lady, and she has more time and motivation to spare for cleaning than she did before she
hired the cleaning lady. She also has that sort of upscale feeling now of having a cleaning lady, which is sort of upper-class when you think about it. One can talk to one's friends about the
marvelous job the cleaning lady is doing, and why don't they get one? Or one can bitch about the fact that the cleaning lady missed dusting the artificial flowers. Whatever. It makes for good conversation over coffee and cake.

6. The cleaning lady is enable to make a living. This is good.

7. End Result: Mrs Baxter does more cleaning than she would have done if she had not hired the cleaning lady, and so does her husband! This is good for both of them. It strengthens the
marriage. :-) The cleaning lady earns money. This is also good. The house gets so frickin' clean that you could eat your scrambled eggs off the floor! Whether this is good or not is debatable,
depending on your viewpoint. I think it's possible for a place to be TOO clean, but that's just my way of seeing it.


I had a girlfriend who was a cleaning lady for a few years. We used to go together and clean the houses on her schedule. I usually vacuumed. Most of those houses were owned by insecure women who made sure to clean them before we got there...and that made the work pretty easy. One, however...one was owned by someone who didn't give a damn. This lady couldn't care less whether people knew she lived in a pigsty, and the house was a disaster. There were several
caged birds, and the place was full of discarded birdseed. Everywhere. It was also full of toys and other stuff scattered all over the place. Cleaning it was a challenge you could really get your teeth into, and it was sort of enjoyable for that reason. Whoever that woman was, she did not suffer from the common insecurities that seem to beset most females.

Reading the comic strip "Kathy" can probably help with gaining some insight into what is going on inside many insecure females' heads.