Oh, my heart bleeds:
Southern California running low on servants
By David Streitfeld
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — The rich might be getting richer, but their lives are hardly trouble-free. In Southern California, there aren’t enough servants to go around.
Wealthy families need more chefs to prepare meals, more maids and butlers to serve them, more housekeepers to keep mansions tidy, and more nannies and night nurses to tend offspring.
“I just filled nine positions, and I could have filled another nine immediately,” says Christopher Baker, who runs Christopher Baker Staffing in Los Angeles.
“The wealthy are living larger than ever. Forget about second homes. Now you have a third home, a fourth home. And these aren’t little shacks. They need staffs.”
[…]
The burgeoning service industry now has its own glossy magazine, CelebStaff: Managing Mansions and Estates. Its offices are in Beverly Hills.
“For the average Joe, this type of lifestyle is unimaginable,” the CelebStaff editors write, “but those that live it will have it no other way!”
If the average Joe only knew, those in the field say, he could be upgrading his own life by working for the wealthy.
“He could be making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year at a mansion in Bel Air with museum-quality furnishings, rather than cooped up as a $9-an-hour computer programmer in a cubicle in Mid-Wilshire,” says Baker, who started his company in 2004 after a stint as a recruiter for a search firm.
High-schooler wondering what do to in life? Worried that all the good jobs have been outsourced? Get your eyes downcast, your hair combed and your shiny shoes and pinny on. Practice saying ‘Yes, Sir/Madam.” to your betters.
Don’t you know being a minion is a noble calling? You should be proud to be a millionaires’ flunky – they made the coiuntry what it is today. Besides, think of all the money you’d save on school; you know all that book-larnin’ would only make you dissatisfied with your lot in life.
However you look at it, servitude’s the way to go, careerwise. It beats being blown up by a roadside IED.
