It’s the Little Things! House Cleaning and Cats (and Booby Traps)
HEADLINE: House cleaning team – caught in booby trap (of their own making)! We think we’re doing a great job for the new customer – we dusted thoroughly, the tubs, showers and mirrors are spotless. We’re doing the multi-step hard surface floors just right – vacuuming into the corners, mopping with overlapping strokes to be sure we ‘get’ every square inch. But – and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, right? The cat’s litter box with its privacy cover – the cover that allows the cat to access and egress on one side only – gets turned by a mere 90° by the gal with the floor mop. Disaster awaits.
Living with Cats (and Cleaners)
If you don’t live with an indoor cat, you may not be aware of their fastidiousness. When their universe is only slightly arwy, they can freak out. So, for example, a cat that might normally go for hours between answering to its normal calls of nature – discovers their bathroom is closed (not for cleaning, alas, but by the cleaning) and they PANIC! Our homeowner comes home to find that their frenzied cat has turned every carpet in the house into their emergency litter box (the panic leads to greater need and more frequent ‘calls’). Result? Client, team and office staff are very upset and some are in tears.
That ‘great job’ for this new customer has gone so very, very wrong. All because of a little, but oh-so-important detail. We will offer (for free, of course) our certified, high-end carpet cleaning professional attention to every carpet in her house https://cleanmychapelhillhouse.com/carpet-cleaning/ . She may (or may not) be thrilled with our attempt to compensate on this grand scale, but to put the best face on it, we’ve learned a painful lesson. In our 23+ years of cleaning, this or a closely related event has happened three times. We will include this example in training new employees and we’ll hash it over in staff meetings. I’m contemplating a ‘wall of shame’ – illustrating potential booby traps so we can all feel less like boobies!
Do you have a booby trap at your house? Do you even tend to think in those terms? We promise: any hints you can give us about these and other potential traps, we will note and record on the team’s ‘every-time’ instructions list. We’ve already learned to caution all our teams to never close a door that leads to the cat’s litter box. This litter box with its privacy lid is a fairly common style – I just point out that this is our first time being the booby over one!