Reply to When did the uber rich stop having live in servants?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "When did the uber rich stop having live in servants?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Quality of service in America is horrible across the board - domestic help, at stores, at work, at school, on calls.  Many are illiterate and/or ESOL- more lost in translations (voluntary or involuntary!).

Think of how many times you find mistakes in orders, sizes, your instructions, the final product? Now multiply that for someone you give the keys to your house and your kids to.

Other countries people have more pride in their work- like Japan. No need to double check anything.

[b]Other countries domestic service industry is more professional- se Asia, Mideast, Eastern Europe[/b]. No matter, they get here, act entitled, assume everyone is a multi millionaire, and quality of service declines— especially if you’re weak at managing people and tasks.

So many do-the-bare-minimum workers here. Such a PITA. Thus when and if you find someone who cares you pay more. But do not pay more for imposters. [/quote]

Um, no.

We're expats.  I've had live-in help in multiple countries, including Russia, India, Singapore, and China.  It isn't what you think.  It isn't good for anybody, even the fortunate employers of the live-in help.  In India, especially, you have to deaden part of your soul in order to share space with someone so very unfortunate, with so limited a future and so miserable a life, to have this, and EVERY lower to upper middle class to upper class person there has a maid.  The maids are regularly taken out of school and put into live-in servant (slave) situations, and beating, rapes, and mistreatment of the help is, from what I saw, the norm.  It warps something in the culture that embraces such a system.

[/quote]

[b]That’s an exaggeration. [/b]

- multiple times expat and FSO [/quote]

That's my post you responded to, and it absolutely is not an exaggeration.

We're in Singapore now, and I wouldn't say the "helpers", as live-in maids are called here, are treated well, but they are treated SO MUCH better than the house maids in India.  [/quote]

It's very much against egalitarian American culture to desire that kind of personal waiting on and as another PP said, it's seen as lazy, weak and a liability to not care for your own basics no matter how wealthy you are.

Anyone who feels so small inside (looking at you trump) who feels like this is a good system and they can lord it over people have something very wrong with them. People who brag about how it is in other countries are being very unself-aware and extremely out of touch.[/quote]

There is a long history of servants and help in the US. The idea that Americans are uncomfortable with home help is always more fiction than reality, given that Americans had no problems having help in the past. My 1930s UMC colonial was built with a live in maid's room and bathroom and my own American ancestors had cooks and maids and housekeepers and they were solidly UMC people, not Vanderbilts. Most of their help were immigrants. Live in help died out due to costs and lack of interest from people who'd have been help in the past. But even today there's not much to differentiate cleaning services dominated by recent immigrants or the waves of Irish or German or Scandinavian girls who served a few years as maids in the 19th and early 20th century before finding a better job.

Incidentally, that is what Trump's mother did when she first came over from Scotland. She worked as a maid for a year or two before she met and married Trump's father. [/quote]

It's not fiction. Plenty of people who can afford the help simply don't want that level of enmeshment and dependency in their own home for the reasons mentioned. What other reason would there be for not using this help you have the room and funds for? Americans are just different. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics