Until very recently, I was a biweekly customer of POSH. They have been coming to clean my house, I…read morebelieve, since I moved in about seven years ago. There have been minor issues over the years (small things broken etc.) but on the whole I considered myself a satisfied customer and trusted them with my home and a key to it. I have recommended them to more friends and colleagues than I can count.
That completely changed at my last cleaning appointment.
I am a type 1 diabetic and have been on insulin since my teens. That means syringes and an insulin pump and insulin pump supplies. If you can picture a round piece of hard plastic with a very small (1 cm) needle that is fully encased in plastic--I use 1-2 of those per week. On second thought, I'll include a photo; see below. These little things have been designed by medical companies to be compatible with every jurisdiction's waste disposal laws, so that if you are out and need to replace your pump infusion site, you can throw it in the garbage without having to worry about "biomedical waste" or sharps that might affect the janitors or waste collectors or what have you. I've been diabetic for over 25 years, you know--I know these laws pretty well. But actually, I also care about the environment, so I remove the little pieces of metal--the 1 cm needles--and put them in a bright yellow clearly marked sharps container right beside the microwave on the counter that the POSH girls have supposedly been cleaning every two weeks for the last seven years. The plastic shell goes in the recycling (not that it ends up getting recycled with the state of plastic recycling being what it is, but that's another story).
To make this 100% clear to all non-diabetics reading this, ALL NEEDLES IN MY HOME ARE EITHER A) COMPLETELY ENCASED IN HARD PLASTIC OR B) IN A CLEARLY MARKED SHARPS CONTAINER. None are accessible to anyone but me at any time, and they NEVER GO IN THE GARBAGE.
I got home from a long day at work and the doctor's after the last cleaning and found a note on my kitchen table to call the POSH office about my "garbage," and indeed an open bag of garbage from my kitchen was on the counter. Imagine my shock to get a reply call to the email I sent telling me there was a "health and safety concern" due to the "needles in the garbage."
This is insulting, offensive, and stigmatizing. There's nothing that even remotely resembles a needle in my garbage, ever. Because that would be ILLEGAL and again, as a diabetic of over 25 years, I know that pretty well. In the garbage they left on my counter that caused them so much concern, there is a mesh bag for clementines, some non-recyclable christmas wrapping paper from my daughter, non-recyclable black plastic cookie containers, old lasagna, and at the very bottom, a piece of medical tubing from my insulin pump. MEDICAL TUBING. Soft plastic. No sharp parts. Just a bit of tubing that connects the pump to the needle and which gets periodically replaced. But you would have to be pretty fucking high to see that and think it's a god-damned needle, and you would have had to be digging through my garbage pretty thoroughly to find it.
In order to find an actual syringe, you would have to rifle through my least accessible cupboards, because I only have a few in case the insulin pump breaks.
So what am I to think?
That these women, who I have trusted with a key to my home for seven years, to make it a bit easier to be a type 1 diabetic single mom to a disabled kid, have been rifling through my garbage, coming to absolutely disgusting conclusions based on what they think they're finding, and judging me for it? And then passing those judgments on to the company owner, who takes it 100% at face value and calls and makes accusations on my voicemail? Guess she didn't want to put that in writing, but here it is in print anyway, Lisa. Merry Christmas.
There's a lot of diabetics out there, and plenty of other people who use syringes and injections for medical reasons as well. If you haven't trained your staff in how to handle that situation or what the law actually is or even that, I don't know, needles are SHARP and made out of metal and if what you're seeing is made out of plastic it's not a fucking needle and no kind of health hazard, that seems like a pretty significant gap that is going to affect your ability to handle a significant portion of the market.
Think very carefully about whether you want these people to have a key to your home.
