14 thoughts on “The End Of Servants”

    2. I agree as well. My wife and I have employed the same fulltime nannie/housekeeper for 12 years and it has made an enormous difference in our quality of life. We are very frugal in many ways and live below our means, but having an extra person to help with child care, houscleaning, laundry and cooking is the major luxury that we afford ourselves. Having such domestic help is unusual in our neighborhood, but it is realy a matter of preferences. We choose to spend our money to free up time and give ourselves flexibility rather than purchase new cars, boats, vacation homes, home remodels and other stuff our neighbors choose to spend their money on.

  2. There is another factor (glaringly) missing from his article.

    We live in a country where damned few think they should ‘lower themselves’ to do manual labor of any kind. Lowering ones self to doing Domestic Chores in someone else’s house is for Illegal Aliens, and girls who got knocked up at 15, beat up at 17, Welfare at 18…trying to “put their lives back together’, 3 kids, no prospects, 28, with a black eye, chain smoking.

    That last part is from an article I read about a small cleaning firm like Merry Maids. Even IN this economy, those were the people that showed up for jobs when the lady was in dire need of 3 or 4 more workers.

    My son is taking Auto Mechanics at the Community College. Most of the guys in his classes now, after just 7 or 8 weeks of a 2 year program, are guys looking to change careers. Several have 4 year degrees but are tired of being unemployed, or losing a job every few months.

    Of the 18 y/o, fresh out of high school guys who started the program, most quit because it was too dirty, too hot, too hard, etc. This, by their own admission, (bitching between classes actually) and not because they had other reasons. Most said their parents tried to convince them they REALLY needed a four year degree so they could ‘get a good job instead of JUST being a mechanic’.

    (emphasis mine)(but not always, I’m certain)

    I’ve said before on this blog, Americans seem to ALL think they can be the rich boss, with the corner office, in the A/C, 9 to 5, paper cuts as life’s only disaster. Well, OK, but if everyone aspires to that, and works towards it, who’s going to FIX your company car, and sweep your office?

    That leaves aside the obvious question of glutted job categories. If everyone is a programmer, technical sales rep or ???, just how much do you think Acme Inc will pay YOU in a glutted field? And WHY, oh WHY does everyone think THEY’LL be the top of their field WITH the corner office, in the A/C…

    People in America, in the late 20th and now in the 21st Century, just think they are ‘too good’ to do manual labor. That’s got to be a death knell for us. IMHO anyway.

  3. There’s nothing wrong with being a janitor, or a housemaid, or a gardener. It’s all honest work. If you have a big house and a large garden and live by yourself or with just your wife or have small children it can be good to have help if you can afford it. When I and my sister were small we had a maid because my father worked all day and it was just my mother and us kids and she just couldn’t cope on her own.

    But yes, it’s not like the old days when every “gentleman” and “lady” above a certain station had a permanent valet or maid that lived with them and did every little thing for them and followed them everywhere, even if said gentleman and lady were single and childless. In fact, the only people who lived by themselves were poor and considered rather pathetic. There’s no need for those kinds of servants any more, as we have electricity, indoor plumbing, flush toilets, and clothing that is easy to put on.

    1. Good points, Andrea. I have a friend who is a gourmet chef and had several prestigious positions over the years. He got tired of it and now works as a school janitor, loves the hours and the lack of stress.

      1. When I visited Napa Valley, my winery tour guide/bus driver was a former chef. Did your friend ever consider a career change less dramatic, because given the choice between sampling some of the finest California wines and kid piss, I know which job I would choose…

  4. That leaves aside the obvious question of glutted job categories. If everyone is a programmer, technical sales rep or ???, just how much do you think Acme Inc will pay YOU in a glutted field? And WHY, oh WHY does everyone think THEY’LL be the top of their field WITH the corner office, in the A/C…

    People in America, in the late 20th and now in the 21st Century, just think they are ‘too good’ to do manual labor. That’s got to be a death knell for us. IMHO anyway.

    My youngest son and I were discussing this last weekend. I remembered a visit to his home in San Diego several years ago when we watched the movie “Fight Club”. There was a line in the movie about how everyone expected to be a rock star, pro athlete or doctor. He resonated with that line. I always wondered who was filling the kids’ heads with such unrealistic expectations. My guess is the school system. Teachers and guidance councilors went from being students themselves (K-12 and college) and then work their entire careers in schools. They don’t know any other life because so few of them have worked any other job. That’s why they may be able to teach a technique in math class but be unable to give any examples of where it’s used in the real world. The result is the attitude that every kid should go to college.

    My father was a carpenter. For several years, he taught carpentry at the local trade school operated by the Huntsville (AL) school system. Huntsville still does it right, IMO. Kids wanting vocational education spend half a day at their high school and half a day at the trade school for 3 years. Contrast that to a single period shop class lasting perhaps a semester that some schools offer if they offer anything at all. By the time kids complete the vocational training in Huntsville, they have a good working set of skills sufficient to get a job in the trades. Dad taught there starting in 1968, so the program has been operating successfully for decades.

  5. Don’t give Obama any ideas or he’ll dictate that everyone earning over $200,000 a year must employ a servant and must pay them a “living wage, full health care, and provide adequate transportation”.

  6. Lerry J,
    don’t blame JUST the schools admin types. I hear that same kind of stuff from parents who say, ‘working with your hands is OK for SOME people, but MY kids are going to college and get a GOOD job!’

    My wife’s sisters BOTH said this to us. When one of them found out our son was FINALLY in school (her term not mine) after JUST being in the military, she was disappointed that he was,

    A) at the community college and

    B) thought he would do something better than JUST be a mechanic.

    She was just as big a know it all when he was running all over the country as a Professional Blaster too.

    Was that ALL he could find!?

    I’m waiting to see how old my nephew is, her son, before he makes his first $100K in one year like my son JUST made in 2005, before construction all but disappeared.

    We’ve heard this stuff from others we know too not just family Larry. If you’re not hearing it, you obviously know better, smarter people than do I.

    1. Yeah, there are a lot of snobs out there, plus a lot of people who have bought into the college Kool-aid. They seem oblivious to the fact that working with your hands is working with your mind. The hands don’t just move themselves or know what to do. The mental processes to diagnose problems with electronics or mechanical systems are the same as a doctor uses for medical problems.

      We can see some of the effects of the higher education bubble in the Occupy Wall Street (or fill in the name of your city) protests. A bunch of them are complaining about their inability to get a job despite having college degrees and their high student loan debts. They’re morons.

      I told both of my stepsons that while a college degree can be helpful, it’s more important to have marketable skills that others want. My oldest stepson is a pharmacy tech. It doesn’t pay all that great but he earns enough to meet his needs and seems content. My youngest is a nurse in the Navy (just pinned on O-3 a few months ago). He enlisted in the Navy out of high school and became a hospital corpsman. After that, he became an ENT surgical tech, then a surgical tech instructor. The Navy sent him to nursing school and he was commissioned afterwards, spending his first tour as an ER nurse at 29 Palms. They’re now sending him to school to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner. He has 18 years in the Navy and is doing quite well.

  7. Plenty of people have servants these days. They all live in Hollywood, and their servants are called “Dieticians”, “Personal Trainers”, “Personal Chefs” and “Life Coaches”.

    I left the work force 4 years ago when my employer was starting to ramp up their layoffs, and went back to school for Public Policy and Administration. Graduated 2 1/2 years ago, and it took me over 6 months to find a job that lasted less than 18 months. In the mean time, I kept my bills paid by working retail and other jobs, and I was one of the few people who actually showed up and worked my full shift every day that I was scheduled.

    At this point, I’m picking up hours at the local community college helping out with their Class A CDL program, where I see students that run the full gambit from “ready to learn a new skill and make money” down to “I’m too good for this”. The latter rarely make it through the program because they don’t think that they need to put in the time studying and sleeping, which is a pretty expensive lesson to learn.

    I still run into people back where I grew up and here where I live who say, “okay, so when are you going to get a REAL job?” I usually reply that my bills are paid and I have an interesting and varied work environment where people have fun and laugh every day of the week. Even at 50% of my previous salary, I’m still happier crawling around, over, and under semi trucks all day than I was at my most recent desk job.

  8. It’s amazing how many people think I should get a ‘better’ job than concrete work, and even more so from the ones that can’t find work when I’ve never drawn unemployment.

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