Bad first impressions of housekeeping services

I’ve been on a mission to find a housekeeper to help keep our place tidy, and it’s been a fruitless bastard of a three-week mission so far. Most companies I have contacted have either not responded, or only responded to say they’re too busy and can’t fit me into their schedule. I can’t believe it. In my whole life, I’ve only known two households that regularly have a housekeeper come do some cleaning, so who are all these people keeping the industry so busy that they can’t come to my place?

I admit that after a number of failed attempts, I put the idea on the back burner. But today I had another bright idea for where to look online for a cleaning company, and did indeed find a few more. But now I’m having my doubts as to who I should contact: some of these companies talk the talk pretty well and say they have lots of professional experience, but I notice lots of grammar errors in their ads and websites, like spaces between the end of words and whatever punctuation follows, lack of any punctuation, capitalizing the first letter of every word, that kind of thing. I know that a good housekeeper doesn’t need to be an anal English geek but I worry that it’s telling, that it just shows that this person or their company doesn’t pay attention to details, that they will do a lousy job of cleaning my house and I will be thoroughly dissatisfied.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Full Housekeeping Service, Clean Organize, Guaranteed Sparkling Clean ! One Time Spring Cleaning.

Or this:

Face it nobody really likes cleaning their bathroom.

I’m not completely writing off any companies that are guilty of this stuff but they’re not going to be my first choice. They’ll likely end up being my sixth or seventh choice.

However, with how this quest is going, those just might end up being the companies I end up with. Egad. I’m not terribly excited to see where this adventure ends up. I foresee it going poorly.

Jeez, what do you do if a housekeeper dies at your house? I’m sure there’d be a lot of paperwork. What a pain in the ass that would be.

everyone speaks english, apparently

a co-worker has been watching a bunch of period shows on netflix lately in which everyone from danish vikings to roman emperors speaks english. mind you, they speak it with a british accent so i guess that’s supposed to illustrate that they’re old world and foreign.

that bugs the hell out of me.

are film and tv producers so lazy that they can’t be bothered to use the correct language of the people they are making shows about? are audiences so lazy that they don’t care about that kind of detail, just as long as they don’t have to read any super annoying subtitles? are audiences expected to believe that a british accent is the only difference between us and every other language in the world?

yup.

i think it’s absurd. it’s like having a talking dinosaur in a serious film aimed at an adult audience. it simply doesn’t make sense and it’s stupid, and people should recognize that.

or how about this: instead of having a british accent, why not have those roman emperors speak in modern english and call each other ‘dude’ and ‘bro’? i think anyone who watched that would say, “holy shit, this is stupid.” but that’s no different from what these shows are already doing. it’s completely fucking inaccurate and laughably absurd but for some reason, it happens all the time without anyone saying so.

if i had a film studies class, rule #1 would be: english with a british accent is not a suitable replacement language for every bygone age and culture.

“‘allo, we’re danish vikings form the 9th century. jolly good then, cheerio.”