Well, THAT'S a bummer

My MIL is coming this week so we had our house professionally cleaned yesterday. I've been so gimpy that I never quite got it back to spic and span after the family of five (three teenage boys!) stayed in our house for the first five days while we were on vacation.

Dudes, you cannot even imagine how much I was looking forward to having that cleaning crew in my house again. Remember? I documented the amazing job they did here. (Go ahead and click on it --it will open in a new window (because HTML R Us) and you won't even lose your place. Go on, click. You need the background.) I woke up early to do the prep for the guys and they showed up at 8:30 on the button.

And they cleaned, right, but just nothing like the first time.

I was sooooo disappointed.

The owner of the company wasn't with them and they just didn't have the same attention to detail AT ALL. They didn't dust the tops of my pictures. They didn't get all the way into the corners of the mirrors and the sliding glass door. They didn't even fold ALL of the toilet paper rolls to points.

I did NOT want to take pictures. I did NOT think they had done a better job than I could have done. In fact, after they left I spent most of the afternoon going back over things they'd missed.

It was good to have it all done at once but it just wasn't at all the experience I was hoping for. You know what it was like? It was like my tomato sandwich yesterday. I decided that if I was going to keep eating tomato sandwiches (with my own homegrown tomatoes!) at every single meal, then I needed to find a way to do it without all of that mayo. So I bought LIGHT mayo and I ate my sandwich and it just wasn't the same. It just flat out wasn't as good. It was still GOOD but it wasn't anything at all like the taste of real mayo on real tomatoes.

My house cleaning was just like the light mayo.

So, I called the owner.

I know, y'all are all falling off of your chairs all over the country. I don't even telephone people I LOVE and I'm not exactly known for my confrontational style. (I'm more of the "Brave Sir Robin Ran Away" school of confrontation.)

I have not been replaced by some alien replica--well, at least as far as I know. But I called him. Because one thing I've noticed about being a New Yorker --if you don't speak up, the other guy is never going to voluntarily make it right. People here ENJOY the Art of the Haggle.

I SO do NOT enjoy that.

But, in the spirit of When In Rome, I called him and he told me that in the future, he would come himself. I didn't get any offers for a re-do or a discount on the next cleaning but he was not defensive and I was strong. For ME, I mean. I was strong for me. My entire goal was not to end even one sentence with a question mark--you know what I mean? Not to say, "So, they didn't even dust my mantle? And they didn't move the furniture back into place once they'd moved it?"

I met my goal.

Of course, I completely sweated through my shirt in the two minutes we were on the phone but at least my voice didn't go up into that register that only dogs can hear.

I'm on my way to the kitchen now to make myself a tomato sandwich with real mayo. I've earned it.

As a total aside, here's a picture Edward looking like he's dreaming of being a super hero. He's asleep with one arm held parallel to the floor in mid-air. Doesn't that seem like it would be uncomfortable?