The Maid Madness

A lot of us here use the services of a house maid in order to cope up with household activities. Maids are these days an inevitable part of our lives. Most of the households have job-going family members and rely on the maid to take care of the household work.Throughout my life, I have always seen one maid or the other at home. During my childhood, mom taught me to call the maid with respect as "khala" (Khala in Urdu means aunt). I have never had problems calling them that, as they were extremely caring and loving. I had my favorite "Mahboob khala" who took care of me for God-knows-how-many-years. She was/is my favorite khala till date. I have never seen such a loving maid ever in my life. I do not remember why she ever left our house, but yeah, she still keeps in touch with us.
Gone are the days when you actually emotionally bonded with a maid, that is a long gone era. Now times have changed..Maids hardly turn up to work, and if they do, they disappear within no time!They demand money as if the money plant in the house has grown in kilometers! They have charges based on the locality you live in, if you are unfortunately staying in an "IT" area - you are dead! The maids there not only ask for a fortune, they have a very low retention too! The worst part! We making them a priority and "adjusting" our priorities and work based on their availability, see how:
- You try to be caring and make tea for her - she will come to work during lunch time!
- You Wanna go for movie? - Only after 3, the maid comes late and leaves only by 1.
- You Wanna take your mom to the doc? - OK, send her alone, somebody needs to be at home to welcome the maid!
- You Wanna go grocery shopping? - let's do it in the weekends! (the maid can help out in some vegetable cleaning)
- You Wanna go out of town? - give the keys to the neighbour and make sure the maid comes!

If all of this is not enough, there are more irritating things about them; it is their creativity with excuses! If you have dealt with a maid before, you would have heard of any/most of these:

- You are unwell and desperately want your maid to come - she wont turn up, and the excuse next day - Both my kids were at home and wanted to spend time with me!
- You have guests coming home and specifically request your maid to come early - she wont come! why? Cos her husband was at home and didn't let her come (what!?!)
- You call the maid's cellphone (Thanks to Ambani, every tom, dick and harry has a phone) - she doesn't answer, why? she forgot to recharge her phone balance!
- You are ready to fire her cos she has not come for a week - she comes back with the excuse that she went to kovil cos her husband was extremely unwell. (For a week??)

Bottom line, I am just too frustrated with my "beloved" maid and I had to vent it out here! My weekends would have been lot more peaceful and simple to manage if not for her! God bless her, her kids, her husband, her sister, her neighbour, her whatever for making my life so challenging!!!