How many maids do you employ in your household? Ah, you think: the better question is, “How many people am I a maid for?”
Don’t be too quick to assume your household is without staff. Most of us do have maids and butlers, we just don’t think of them that way. We pay for them. They need care. Occasionally they retire and need replaced. Sometimes they get sick and require a doctor. It’s just that most of our maids are the mechanical variety and make modern living possible. So let’s start again.
How many mechanical maids do you employ in your household?
Mechanical Maids
That’s a different story isn’t it, because modern homes have many mechanical helpers:
- Washer
- Dryer
- Iron
- Dishwasher
- Stove
- Refrigerator
- Deep Freezer
- Microwave
- Electricity
- Indoor Plumbing
- Furnace
- Air Conditioning
- Running Water
- On Demand Hot Water
- Vacuum
- Toilet
- Computer
- Books
- Automobile
- Lawnmower
- Snow blower
- Telephone/cell phone/personal communication device
- Garage door opener
Quite the extensive household staff, wouldn’t you say? Even first apartments and starter homes come equipped with most of the above. We are so used to their behind the scenes work in our modern lives, we don’t even acknowledge how much service they provide for us or how much time they save.
Too many of us are like David Copperfield’s wife, Dora—naïve and gullible about how to hire and manage our help to get dependable, trustworthy versions who will do their job well. Some of us neglect the basic care our staff requires, and then are both surprised and angry when they get sick and we need to pay some of our hard-earned money to return them to health or to hire replacements.
Caring for the Staff
Many of us have taken no personal interest in our household staff. We don’t know how often their filters need changed, when they should be drained or primed or sharpened. Some that are relegated to live and work in our basements or garages never even get a bath. Many of us are ignorant of the oversight we should be providing. Sometime our parents never taught us how to manage staff; but let’s face it, some modern staff never even existed for our parents.
Now we find ourselves in our own household, learning either by trial and error or as the result of sad experiences. Without a clear sense of how capable our staff should be at performing their basic tasks, we tend to evaluate their performance on superficial characteristics, like their designer colors, which is the newest, or costs the least (or the most). Would you hire a human cook based solely on his or her looks?
Training Children to Oversee Staff
If we want to be capable executive overseers, we need to take a personal interest in our mechanical maids, provide the care they need to function well, understand their work habits and needs, make wise decisions about their replacements, and understand the full import of what taking on more staff means for our oversight responsibilities. Perhaps, most important of all, we need to show our children and other apprentices how to effectively oversee such a large household staff for themselves.
Managing Mechanical Maids Happens in the Priority House Laundy
We need to remind ourselves on a regular basis, that much of our “work” consists of loading and unloading, turning dials, pushing buttons, or guiding around furniture or across the lawn, servants who are doing the actual work for us. The laundry of our priority house, has nothing to do with actual clothes washing, and everything to do with staff management. In the priority house Laundry, we meet with all of the mechanical maids who make up our staff, get to know them better, address their (usually) simple needs, make wise decisions about their replacements, and assure that our heirs also learn how to treat the help with wisdom, skill, respect, and gratitude.
Priority Stewardship 