Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Here I am again, griping about my life

Throughout my childhood my caretakers have for the most part been in the form of philipino maids, Susan, and some other nondescript characters that I can't remember were the ones who took care of me and my sister through our childhood years, the maids were our playmates, the person who cooked food for us, and the person who told us weird ghost stories. You could say that the maid was like our second guardian. Which might have been the reason for my slightly twisted personality...

Having had a friendly English speaking maid as a ruler to measure with is probably why it feels so disappointing( after Susan disappeared to only god knows where after her 4 year + contract ran out...) when all the maids to grace my home have been
- stealing my things (one of them stole my piggybank, another one stole my hand phone, and another one stole all my 1 ringgit coins in my coin box)
- vandalizing things at our home (one of them actually broke the handle to the door at her room, apparently because it made opening the door easier... . .)
- putting funny things into the food
- probably something I never found out...
It's baffling why these maids would do these sort of things, it makes me wonder what type of mentality they have, it's not as if their being abused, for the most part we treat them really well. I'm not one to demean groups of people, but these village Indonesians have really been a thorn at my side, and it's nigh impossible to get Filipinos help these days, as most of them have gone to Taiwan or Hong Kong, where the pay is much better, so the Malaysian are stuck with the labour force from the back alleys of Indonesia, these people can't speak a word of english, their lazy, they vandalize your property, they don't appreciate your help, and some of them treat working in Malaysia as some sort of holiday. Its disgusting. This coupled with my mother(she complains about the maid everyday for several hours) was the reason why I was against getting a maid for extra help around the house. After several months since the last maid quit(got fired) working at my home, and my mother starts complaining that she's doing all the work, etc etc etc. This is a complete lie, as the only thing she does for the family is wash and hang the clothes, even then most of the time the clothes are not mine since I throw mine in my room and take them out to wash all at once, she does not feed the dogs, I do that, she does not wash the dishes because quote "My hands are too sensitive" end quote, either my dad or I do that, she does not go to the market to get food for the family, my dad does that, she does not cook for the family, we go out to eat, my dad pays for that. She contributes almost nothing in the house, but somehow manages to convince herself that shes doing everything in the house. Whether this is some sort of self induced delusion shes going through I do not know, but this has lead to a new problem at home; because my mom's complaining so much, my dad got one of his worker's wife to work full time at our house, but with this 'helping hand' around... more problems are cropping up.

The extra help happens to be from Myanmar, not an Indonesian, that in itself I suppose is a good thing but heres the catch. She doesn't speak a word of English.... and shes never worked as a maid before... that was fine with me, I don't mind using hand gestures to get the message across, but then I find out that shes greedy, she doesn't just eat 3 meals a day, she cooks supper for herself and she finishes whatever is left out. She actually ate half of a traditional dessert that was left out on the table, something I was planning to finish later on, without telling me a single thing and shes eating all the eggs in the fridge, when my mom asked her she actually had the gall to say that I was the one who asked her to cook it, and she doesn't wash the clothes properly, shes so lazy she dips the clothes into soap water, dips them into clear water, squeezes the water out and thats it, thats what constitutes as washing clothes, hell even I'm not that lazy, and I'm a sloth. Just what the hell is going on, I used to think that foreign maids were people who were hardworking who came all the way to this country because they were too poor and wanted to earn enough to bring something back home, but here I am dealing with lazy, dishonest, greedy, thieving snots. I wonder whether these people would actually care if they lost their jobs, if the job means so little to them why did they bother going overseas to work in the first place.

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