For the past couple of months, I’ve been having “Aroma Corporate Cleaning” come by on alternate Tuesdays and clean my apartment. It’s kind of expensive (seventy bucks) — two people come by for a couple of hours, which seems like a lot of person-power for one small place. So I talked to Jennifer, the nice woman at Lafayette Cleaners, where I do my laundry, and she had a friend named May come by. May did a nice job, and it was fifty bucks, so I figured that I’d save forty bucks a month. Except that I forgot to cancel Aroma this week, with the result that May came by on Monday and cleaned my apartment, and then Aroma came by on Tuesday and two more people cleaned it. That’s three trained professionals cleaning an area the size of a postage stamp.


When I got back home on Tuesday night, the apartment was aggressively clean — the bed had razor-sharp hospital corners, the shower curtain looked as if it had been sandblasted, and the floor seemed to have gained some sort of protective diamond carapace.