House sitting for a rich person is supposed to be fun.
But before we begin I’d like to admit that I am actually unclear on why anybody without pets needs their house sat upon at all. If you are rich enough to pay a stranger to live at your house while you are out of town — or rich enough to expect your friend to do it for free — are you not rich enough to just rig up some lights on timers and put in code CRIMINAL to get 10% off a SimpliSafe security system? And either way, shouldn’t the job be advertised more honestly to either friend or stranger as “private security/amateur decoy/pet EMT”?
Even the cleanest, most respectful human is likely going to leave their imprint on your house while living in it. I’m told by “experts” that the old canard about dust being mostly made up of human skin is not true. But I also have seen a very talented artist’s rendering of how much dead skin a few years of sleeping will leave on a mattress, and you cannot convince me that having a naked or semi-naked person in any bed under your roof is better than not having them there. Even if their absence means somebody steals all your old Magic The Gathering® cards. Not to mention that most people house sitting for a rich person, given the usually high quality of rich person mattresses and linens, are likely going to have sex in that house. And even the least vigorous sex is going to leave behind enough of the insides and outsides of someone’s body to call into question your cost/benefit analysis.
A few years ago I did some house & pet sitting for a friend who no longer talks to me. And I’m convinced that this experience was the beginning of the end for us. It all started off pleasantly enough with a request/offer to house sit his enormous beautiful mansion while he was gone for a few weeks. The “job” would include some pet feeding and monitoring, which increased my level of anxiety ten fold, but not enough for me to decline an opportunity to use a hot tub and drink wine I will never be able to afford out of glasses I could never afford to break. So I enthusiastically said yes, even before he winked subtly and told me, a 30ish-year-old single male in the early days of Tinder, to “treat it like your own.”
As a deeply insecure dater I took him — married, good-looking, rich — to be making a wry indictment of my abilities, certain he couldn’t be encouraging me to have actual sex in his house. “Treat it like your own.” You mean eat a whole pizza for dinner and then watch 2 documentaries and then have a second dinner of Taco Bell and Wendy’s that I had to put on pants to go get and where I somehow spent $40 on my second dinner at two places that have a $.99 menu? “Treat it like your own.” Ah! So get a surprise erection while reading rec.music.phish and then speedwalk to the bathroom, one forearm quickly tiring from carrying a jostling laptop while simultaneously trying to open an incognito tab with the opposite hand? “Treat it like your own”! Yes! I will reluctantly go out to a bar and drink too many bourbon sodas and then go play some Addams Family pinball and dance awkwardly before returning home alone to Real Housewives of Atlanta reruns with a messy kabob and the beginnings of a hangover.
Were I a less anxious person I might have taken “treat it like your own” as a kind of multi-week sex challenge, the sort you used to find in movies running from 10 to Midnight on Tuesday nights on TBS. The one they show right before that other one about the kid who works at the pizza place that accepts an order for “extra anchovies” and then unwittingly ends up a gigolo for the town’s undersexed moms.
Not being sure what he meant, I tried not to respond to his suggestion and mentally recommitted to sleeping alone like a sarcophagus and doing all my eating and drinking for two weeks out of a single large wine glass.
Due to circumstances (mostly) beyond my control, I can now tell you what “treat it like your own” does *not* mean. It does not mean “tell your female friend who is traveling through town that of course she can stay with you for a few days and breathe the mountain air while you work and then be in the home alone while the woman who cleans the house comes to do her job and is surprised by the presence of a recently showered woman she is unfamiliar with.” It definitely does not mean a week later when another female friend has the ceiling in her rented apartment cave in after a sewage accident upstairs that she can stay with you for another few days while her absentee landlord slowly fixes her apartment. It especially doesn’t mean that if that stay coincides with the next weekly visit from said housekeeper, who is now meeting a second woman she doesn’t know engaging in the sort of activities — showering! eating! reclining on a kitchen barstool with suspiciously sexual nonchalance! — that might indicate your house guest is a sex cult leader.
And it super duper doubly doesn’t mean do both of these things if you have already made the aforementioned housekeeper irritated by leaving an empty wine bottle with some light gunk on the bottom on the nice marble countertops so that there is a strange bottle-shaped ring of gunk to clean in a house that is normally fastidiously gunk-free. It doesn’t mean any of this if this housekeeper (maybe rightly!) understands her job to mean, while the owner/her boss is out of town, “keep an eye out for secret orgies; even short guys with middling jobs in tech can have them.” And it most assuredly definitely does not mean any of these things if your friend first hears about all of this from his wife, who herself heard about the confirmed orgy and the (exaggerated! fabricated! misleading!) clues that led to the orgy diagnosis in one long gossip session after she returned home from a long grueling flight or five.
It probably didn’t help our relationship that one week after my ignominious stint as a house sitter one of the pets went into organ failure and nearly died.
