The Power of The Help

I never blog about work, but this is not really about work anyway...

I hate blaming the underpaid, hardworking hired help when things go awry. I really, really hate it. It's the first thing my mother thinks of and it drives me nuts. My mother says some of her jewelry went missing after she went to the skilled nursing facility to recover from knee surgery, it must have been the help. The bonded, carefully screened help. I don't think so - I carefully stayed out of it as I didn't have anything useful to say besides "You are such an elitist." which I have told her since and will probably say it again for what it's worth and "Keep looking" (it was in the safe deposit box of course).

But sometimes the evidence is incontrovertible. I set up a home network for our company's president and it would be working and work fine for a week and go down. I would come back and find it unplugged. Plugged it back in, things working again. In a week it would go down. And repeat. It turns out, the maid comes in to vacuum and lacking a plug, unplugs the router. It actually would sort of be fine if she were to plug it back in, but that doesn't happen. This time an employee was house-sitting and she's quite bright so I went over the situation with her and we devised a plan to leave a plug for the blasted vacuum and make the other cords less tempting and she's going to leave her a note. I also went over the basic layout of the very simple network with her so I now have another pair of eyes who does go over there from time to time (more often than I do.)

The entire situation makes me laugh. One maid with little to no understanding of little boxes with leds on them, armed with one vacuum in search of a power outlet wields an awful lot of power. The power to halt an entire network, and bring out what in this case is an over paid plug-in technician (I made that up) out to patch it all back together.