» Tue Sep 01, 2009 11:33 pm So... a curse has befallen the house and office in which I work and reside. That curse came in the form of a housekeeper my mother hired two weeks ago. She speaks about 5 words of English, and only just barely. She's mostly here to help with the laundry since we're so busy this time of year and my parents are getting older and aren't so much up for running up and down stairs with bags of laundry too often. In the time between loads, she cleans the house. This... this is a problem for me. This is a BIG problem for me. My parents like how well she cleans and how she organizes things, but when it comes to things in my personal space, her work is disruptive and destructive, because she throws away things that aren't trash. She's been here three times and she's already cost me more than she gets paid for a day's work by throwing away a box and receipt for something I needed to return to the store and can't now, boxes of non-perishable foods that were open but unused which I bought with my own money and was going to use, and some unbent and cut hanger wires that I'm using to make some nautical signal flags stand straight out when they are hung on a stage set at a conference our business is putting on in two days. The wires have set me back probably 2 hours worth of work on the last day we have to prepare in the office before everything gets carted off to the conference location, which is a 3 or 4 hour drive from here. That is a Big Freaking Deal. For some reason every time she's come over here, she reorganizes my drawers and closet and hauls stuff into my room that is not mine and leaves it here to clutter up the place. I mean, she put a bunch of apples in the back of one of my desk drawers. REAL APPLES. Why the heck would anyone ever do that?? I shudder to think what might have happened if that had been a drawer of stuff I didn't need to open for a week or two. She took the screen out of my window and stashed it on top of some stuff on my highest closet shelf. I thought she threw THAT away, too, and only found it again by accident, a week after buying a replacement. She rolled up some posters I hadn't hung yet and stuffed them in a drawer so a couple of them are now creased and ripped from catching on the edges when I pulled the drawer out. She practically balled up a poster I was going to have framed, which I've had since I was 12 and is very important to me because it was a gift from someone I have great love and respect for.
I would like very much to quietly murder this woman and hide her body, but that is not legal, ethical, or good for my PR, and it would annoy my parents. So I'm going to do the diplomatic thing and try to communicate with her. However, I do not speak any Spanish, and I know from trying to translate phrases in languages I DO speak that online translators are unreliable at best. Therefor I emplore you, people of gamesas forums, if any of you can translate something into Spanish, will you please help a poor overworked student/employee/parent out??
I just want to say to her -- in writing, because lord knows I'll never pronounce it properly, "Please do not throw away anything that is not in a trash can." I would also really like to say, "Please do not go into my room to clean it, just leave the laundry outside the door." Can you folks help me??
