FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Newswire.net — February 04, 2013) London, UK — One family in Cleveland, Ohio, discovered that having a “cleaning fairy” arriving unexpectedly into your home and tidying it isn’t as much of a dream come true as it could have been.
A home owner returned to her house and discovered that during her absence, the house had been cleaned and the garbage removed. The woman’s teenage daughter denied doing the cleaning – she had been asleep upstairs while the “cleaning fairy” had been in the house – but the mystery was partly solved when the woman and her daughter found a napkin on the table with a phone number and a bill for US$75. The woman phoned the number to enquire whether the cleaning was done and the invoice was left at the wrong house. The “cleaning fairy” answered the call by saying that no mistake had been made and this was what the “cleaning fairy” often did as a way of earning money.
The police took a rather dim view of the Cleaning Fairy’s activities and arrested her for breaking and entering, and the Cleaning Fairy was sentenced to a period of 20 hours’ community service, especially as this was not the Cleaning Fairy’s first offence, and she had tried this way of getting money in the past. It is possible, although this is mere speculation, that other recipients of the Cleaning Fairy’s unsolicited services may have been willing to pay and the matter was not drawn to the attention of the police.
“It sounds like something out of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld,” said a representative from CarpetFirst, a London-based company providing a comprehensive range of home and office cleaning services. “It must be one of the most bizarre ways of providing cleaning services that we’ve heard of. I mean, there are easier ways to do it if you want to start at the bottom as a freelance cleaner rather than joining a professional cleaning team.” Commenting further, the CarpetFirst representative stated, “While it’s not unheard of for people to organise a professional cleaner to come round to another person’s house and clean it as a surprise gift, this is always done in an above-board way. Our cleaners would never force a door or slip in through a window. The closest we ever come to being Cleaning Fairies is when we’re asked to clean an office after hours – but we get given the keys for that sort of thing.”
Having a visit from a Cleaning Fairy who tidies your house invisibly is a fairly common fantasy and several traditional folk tales use this motif (e.g. the Elves and the Shoemaker). However, in real life, the practice of entering another person’s home uninvited, especially a stranger’s home, and demanding money for unsolicited services is clearly a violation of privacy and an example of burglary. The representative from CarpetFirst had the following advice for anybody wanting to surprise a friend or relative with a Cleaning Fairy. “You have to be organised. Arrange for your friend or relative to be out of the house, but be there to let us in. Alternatively, just have us turn up at a time that’s convenient to your friend or relative and we’ll tell them that someone’s paid to have their place cleaned. We will send out a bill, of course, but it’ll go to you, not the person whose house we cleaned.”
Editor’s Note:
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