Housecleaning service begins, adjustable bedrame arrives

On November 14, the housecleaning service I contacted last week came over and cleaned both bathrooms, the entry mirror, the kitchen floor, the sliding glass door, and the outside glass table.  I decided not to have them touch my new vinyl plank flooring in the hall and two bedrooms, or anything in the living room, or anything else not listed, to be safe from accidental damage.  They did a nice job, even doing lots of little unexpected things, like cleaning the soap dishes in the bathrooms.  They worked hard for 2 1/2 hours and charged $80.  I gave them a $30 tip and should possibly have tipped even more.  We talked about doing my housecleaning just like this every month, on the Thursday preceeding the last Sunday of the month (when I have my party), and that's now the plan.  This was a family business with husband and wife, but the wife has cancer and had surgery yesterday, so the husband works with a hired lady who only spoke to her boss in Spanish but otherwise seemed nice.  I couldn't have imagined nicer cleaning people.  Hopefully this is the beginning of a new clean home lifestyle.  I hope to get my Scooba 830 to clean the vinyl plank floors and leave them germ free.

(Speaking of germ free, my germ paranoid friend came over shortly afterwards and wiped down the faucet handles and door knobs with sanitizing wipes.  You can get terrible germs from cleaning services, she said.  She is also paranoid about electricity, and asked me the night before how the stuff in my computer room was supposed to be safe from starting a fire.  We've been through that same question before.  I may have a ton of collectible audiophile equipment on 90" of Scandia shelving, but hardly anything is actually plugged in, just two printers and a router.  The rest of the stuff in the computer room is awaiting repair, sale, or future use.  I'm very very careful about electricity.  I never overload circuits, I know how much current each thing plugged in actually uses, and it's always far less than the wiring can handle.  I had the 20A breaker (installed by the home builder in 1983) downgraded to a 15A breaker (which code now requires for 14g wall wiring the home builder used) to be extra sure the breaker will catch anything bad before a fire could start in wiring.  Despite using vast arrays of equipment since I was a kid, I haven't blown a breaker in over 30 years.  I did get shocked once about 40 years ago and remember it well.  My surge suppressors often have their own circuit breakers, but I never plug surge suppressors into surge supressors; only non-surge strips should be plugged into surge strips, and I pay careful attention to which is which.  Everything in all three bedrooms has GFCI protection through key GFCI outlets following my vision (but actually installed by electricians, except for the first GFCI outlet which I myself installed over 20 years ago and it still works fine).  What all that means is you basically can't get injured from shock.  But I'm so careful, I've never even tripped the GFCI's (sometimes it happens anyway from power surges).  How many people even know about all these things?  I say all this, but she still seems unimpressed, she looks at me as though I were some careless teenager, and I don't like that.  I should have 3 or more PhD's for all my areas of expertise, including electrical design, but I get no respect  from women, going way back to my own mother (though I felt mother gave far too little respect to my freethinking ideas and personal ideals, it was my mother who had me doing electrical installation and plumbing when I was 16 years old--and I'll admit, I really wasn't qualified then).  I once worked as an electronic technician in an audio store where I routinely repaired high voltage tube equipment, and believe me, I was the most cautious of all the techs there by far.  Nowadays, I don't do electrical installation myself because I prefer having the best electricians do it, and less for me to worry about.  But I continue to learn more and be far more knowledgeable than most people and their mothers about electronics as well as electrical safety.)

While the cleaners were operating, a "logistics" company came and delivered the new Ergomotion 400 bed frame.  I had paid $150 extra for "white glove delivery."  After scoping out the room, they removed the adjustable frame from it's packaging outside on the street.  They carried the frame in it's own padded cover to the door, but then slid the frame down my vinyl plank hallway.  I almost stopped them, but noticed the frame cover was padded and likely wouldn't damage my floor.  When I spoke to the dispatcher the day before they said that the bed "would be carried by two men" so it would not drag on the floor--and then that's what they did anyway.  I didn't think about possibly damaging the padded frame cover, which it did--just a little.  When they left there was a finger sized black smudge on one side of the frame cover, and a few small tears on the headboard side.  I brushed off the smudge with a dry cloth so that it all but disappeared (it's now about the size of the edge of a nickel) and rubbed the loose threads so they are mostly blended in with the cover.  It could have been worse, but it was not as good as I had hoped.  They almost trashed the warranty card (I fished it out of trash they were going to throw away) and one guy came back from the truck with the manual--after they had formally left.  They were at my house a total of about 20 minutes.

To me, it's pretty obvious where the greater respect is due among these service people.  And quite possibly this proves the power of relationship, the cleaners are hoping to establish a long term client relationship with me, the logistics people were hired by someone else, all they wanted from me was the signed release of liability.  I sometimes wonder if I'd get more respect from women if they could imagine being on my payroll too, rather than imagining me as an overgrown kid needing a motherly nag more than anything else.