The trouble with maids

Usually this kind of things shouldn’t happen, but this maid that we got was particular troublesome.

Having a maid is suppose to help you out in the house. Sometimes you get good maid and they are really a big help. And sometimes you get one that is too smart for her own good. No doubt she was able to do many of things instructed even using complicated household equipment like that expensive vacuum cleaner that my wife bought and even do fruit juicing.

However she has some very notorious bad habits. She don’t quite like to be a maid and yet she is now stuck in Malaysia due to her contract. Unfortunately she was not able to tough out the 2 years contract necessary to return back to Cambodia.

From the conversations with her, it seems her background was not too bad, except that she was not able to complete her education. She sees many of her friends go overseas to work as maid and return and she made a choice for a tryout.

But I guess being a maid is not to her liking as the work requires discipline and from her background she might be a little pampered. There are also many rules and requirement from a maid. But most importantly is that we need her to do as instructed. Unfortunately her heart is not there at all.

Initially she tried to do her job after giving her counseling from us as well as from the agency. But after awhile she started to do things like taking certain food and drinks not meant for her, and lie about completing task when we could see the place is still dirty.
Bluff one time, she may get the benefit of the doubt, lie too many times and it will be like the boy who cried wolf and nobody trust her.

Since she is working under my mom-in-law supervision, and knowing my mom-in-law who is very fastidious, a poorly done job should be redone, and that’s where a heated row get started. She insist she has done her task, but what is wrong to do it again if she didn’t do it right the first time? In the end, the maid decided to quit.

For a maid to quit her assignment, she will lose out due to the contract. For every house that rejected her, she will have to start over again losing six months of her wages. And since this will be her second assignment where she was rejected. The poor record would mean that she will have difficulty being recruited with future potential employers.

Now here’s the bombshell. After she made her intention to quit. She sat at a corner in the house. Since neither my wife nor I was free to take her back to the agency on the next day, my mom-in-law locked her out of the house where she sat at the porch just in case she may do something very bad such throwing a fit or stealing. I wouldn’t want my son who is just 15 months old to come to any untoward incident.

Perhaps sitting there at the porch and the thought of returning to the maid agency was a little too humiliating for her and in a second of insanity, she decided to run off.

Now this is big problem for us and very troublesome and tedious procedure. It would entail making a police report to absolve us of any responsibility for any trouble or incident that the maid might cause. I heard that we would get fine about RM200 to RM300 if a maid runs away.

Sometimes we see in the media where the employers abuse the maid. Of course that is wrong. On the other hand, we as employers also face problems and issues with disobedient maid. So in the end it might be better if we can tough out on our own without maid help and avoid all the hassle.

And I had problem with a maid that wasn’t to be too before this one. But that is a different story. For now, is what to do with this maid that has now become a bit of handful to handle.

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Whoa! Just received call from mom-in-law, it seems the maid hailed a taxi cab and found her way back to the maid agency. Fortunate for her, as our next step was to make a police report and that would be very bad for her. Well at least that settled the part about the running away bit.

So now it will depend on the agency for the maid replacement and how they want to go about it.

Related:
My maid ran away and stole my PC gadgets, netbook, mobile phone, watches, money and jewelery!