We had Merry Maids for a few years. I really liked them. They'd send out a team of 3 or 4 girls to clean, and it usually only took them about an hour and a half to do it all. Really enjoyed that.

Then one day, they sent out a team with a new girl. I discovered that she stole $20 out of my jewelry box. I called their boss and reported it (they were still cleaning upstairs) and then went upstairs to tell the girl that was the head of the group. It was kind of difficult to get across to the girl what was wrong (they all spoke spanish and not much english) but she realized what was going on pretty quick and knew who did it.

The girl who had done it came running into the room before I had said anything, and was telling the head cleaner that I was a lying "expletive" (I know more spanish swear words than anything else in that language) and had pretty much admitted what happened before I could say anything to the girl.

They had to wait here until their boss showed up. We never did call police, and it wasnt until the next day that we realized she'd gotten away with about half of my mom's good jewelry. Which was worth close to a little over $1000. The boss gave me my $20 back out of her own pocket. We never did get my mom's stuff back. We did get a year of free cleaning from the owners tho...so that sort of made up for the theft.

It did cause my mom to get a phobia about cleaning people. Now we have one person, the owner of her own cleaning service (she has about 4 or 5 employees) who cleans our house now. She does the cleaning herself for us. We trust her more than her employees because we figure she's not going to risk her company's reputation by stealing from us.

It is a bit irritating tho that she calls out sick a LOT. (four or five times this year already) And she's got weird ideas on where she should be cleaning, kept telling me she charged extra for baseboards and panel doors. I'm guessing that's why she charges $115 now instead of the $95 that she charged to have one of her employees clean.

She does a better job on the upstairs than she does on my basement. She makes my mom's bed up neatly and changes her sheets, but she doesnt do mine. The way she's made my bed for me is weird too..she just flips the blankets back up and doesnt straighten out the lumpy bits...but she does that for my mom's bed.

My dad's the one who hired her, so I dont complain about the way she's cleaned my room. I am going to ask her to clean my bathroom in a different order than she does tho. She starts with the toilet, and cleans up from there...using the soapy toilet water to wipe down the counters (ewwww...even if it's soapy, it's still icky!) I always want to wipe the entire bathroom down after she leaves with bleach wipes. But, why should I have to clean my bathroom a second time after my dad's paid her money to clean it once.

At least she cleans everything else really well. She even gets the inside of the toaster where all the crumbs from the toast fall into and cleans under the refrigerator and along the sides of the stove and the washer/dryer where it always gets really dusty. She'll even sweep the front porch before she leaves. So, that kind of makes up for my bathroom.