Netflix and Clean?

As I’ve said before, I prefer to clean when my clients are not at home. It’s easier, faster and I can zone out to Youtube videos on my phone about Search Engine Optimization and how to write the perfect blog post (riveting, and captivating, an edge of your seat blog, I know). Unfortunately, this is usually not the case, especially throughout the pandemic. Most were stuck in the house binging Netflix and generally mucking up the place. By mucking, I mean elastic sweat pants and I’ll clean tomorrow attitude. And, lucky for me, I got to see what my clients consider entertainment.

Midge doesn’t watch anything unless it is fifty years old. Her favorite channel is Turner Classic Movies. She loves the black and white movies where special effects were a little more than someone being shot and taking 5 minutes to die. I’ve know this since last year when her cable provider decided to stop offering it in her package. I spent an hour on the phone with them trying to get around paying for the whole Sports Package that it now resides in (brilliant). Can you imagine Jimmy Cagney shooting someone and then breaking out into a chorus of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”?

They finally decided to offer it alone because hoards of little old ladies descended upon the Comcast headquarters waving their canes like pitchforks and demanding the head of whatever lamebrain took away their Casablanca and Roy Rogers. It resembled a scene out of the Walking Dead if the Zombies were in wheelchairs and Hoverounds.

I actually enjoy a lot of the old movies she watches. The only thing I don’t enjoy is her turning the volume up to 100 on the TV because she lost her hearing aids. You can only listen to “Follow The Yellow Brick Road ” so loud until you losing touch with reality and start seeing flying monkeys. I offered to pay for a “lip reading” course but she couldn’t hear me.

I’ve really gotten to see the feminine side of my Bachelor client through the pandemic. It turns out he’s a real softy. He likes movies like When Harry Met Sally and Steal Magnolias, the latter of which I walked in on him at the end and he was balling his eyes out. I mean UGLY crying. And for three weeks my visits coincided with his binging “13 Reason’s Why” and we both ugly-cried on the couch together.

The Artist, on the other hand, has something deeply wrong with her. She’s really into the torture horror movies. Torture porn, if you will. Movies like Hostel and Cannibal Holocaust. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good horror movie, I grew up on them in fact. I’m just not into 45 minutes of cutting limbs off one by one while listening to hysterical screams and then using them as room decorations. I mean, the movies she watches borderline on snuff films. I envision her late at night pouring over the dark web trying to find the most twisted ways to eviscerate a body. It certainly sheds some light on her Valentine’s Day massacre of paper hearts. Interesting room decorations indeed. On her days, I go home and put on a Disney movie and down two bottles of wine.

Old Iron Sides is into anything on HGTV. I do enjoy watching all the remodeling shows although it is dangerous for me as I go home and look around at ways I can improve my own house. I’d like to take out some walls and make it more open too. Needless to say, Mr. Cleaning Lady has since hidden the sledgehammer from me as well as put alarms on bedroom doors so I don’t sleepwalk remodel.

So hopefully, now that everything is back open, my clients will find other things to do. Preferably somewhere else while I am trying to do my job.