Maiden Voyage

A trip to Singapore creates an addiction to housecleaning help

Last month my girlfriend and I went to Singapore to visit her parents, who live there. Singapore is Bizzaro-World in many ways: McDonald’s delivers. Motorcyclists ride with their jackets on backwards and unzipped, a look I haven’t seen since Kris Kross hit puberty. The cops can pull you over and congratulate you for courteous driving—ironically, this happened to Heather’s dad, who is of the opinion that every other motorist, anywhere, is half-blind, retarded and criminally insane, and drives accordingly. He probably became so enraged in traffic that he lost consciousness for a moment and accidentally yielded, because the police pulled him over and gave him a teddy bear. This is like Jeffrey Dahmer winning an award from the National Society of Vegans.

Singapore is also very neat and orderly, as you might expect in a country where the penalty for most crimes is death. OK, I might be exaggerating a bit—but how often do you go on a Duck Tour and have the guide say, “That’s the new courthouse. Going to be plenty of hanging sentences in there!”

This fanatical neatness extends all the way into the home, and in Singapore, if you’ve got a house, you’ve got a live-in housekeeper. Heather’s parents’ housekeeper is named Emily. She cooks, does the laundry and keeps the house tidy. All of this took some getting used to for me. In our culture, you’re conditioned to do things for yourself—here’s your coffee, and the milk’s right over there if you want some. Self-serve gas stations. Self-checkout at stores. ATMs instead of bank tellers. So it’s disconcerting to have someone around who cares whether you prefer to have your boxers ironed (answer: of course).

Initially, I felt bad about having Emily do anything. I’d put my coffee cup in the sink, for instance, and Heather’s mom would tell me that I was supposed to leave it on the table, or else I was implying that I didn’t think Emily was good at her job. Once I started thinking about the situation that way, I fell into the role of guy-who-has-a-maid pretty easily. You get used to leaving things messy and coming back to find them miraculously straightened out. Ironing is one of my most-hated domestic chores, but in Singapore my shirts appeared each day hanging in the closet without a wrinkle. I did spend one day roaming around the city wearing linen pants so severely creased that if I fell down I might have chopped off one of my legs, but we got the “no creases” edict in effect from there on out.

After getting used to having Emily around, Heather and I made a major household decision upon our return to the States. We hired a cleaning lady—actually, two cleaning ladies. They’re scheduled to come in once a month, and after two visits, I’m hooked.

Last time they came in while we were gone for the weekend, and upon our return I walked around and tried to quantify exactly what they’d done to make the place look so damn clean, so that maybe I could try to execute a few of those tricks myself in between visits. Certainly the bathroom mirror was free from toothbrush spittle and the inside of the microwave was spotless, but here’s the most awesome thing I discovered: When we left, my flip-flops were in the bathroom, covered in sand from the beach. When we returned, they were rinsed and carefully folded atop one another next to the shower. That, my friends, is bona fide extravagance. You can have your Newbury Street shopping sprees and rare bottles of wine at the Federalist; I’ll place outsourced flip-flop maintenance alongside any luxury indulgence this side of a yacht so big that it needs a small helicopter just to fly up to where you park its big helicopter. Based on the hourly charge of the housekeepers (around $50, I think), it probably cost almost as much to wash those flip-flops as I paid for them in the first place. I don’t know what you heard about me, but I’m a P-I-M-P.

The problem is, I can’t derive this kind of satisfaction from cleaning things on my own any more than I can tickle myself. So I have to either wait another month…or improvise: If I sat on my hand until it fell asleep and then ironed my underwear, would it seem like someone else did it? There’s only one way to find out.