Yes, Virginia, there is a cleaning fairy, and she pleaded guilty to burglary on Monday in Cleveland, Ohio.
Because the law is a very literal institution, the fairy has been identified as Susan Warren, who confessed that she sometimes gets bored, breaks into strangers’ homes and cleans, according to the Associated Press. Warren got caught because on her last job (we assume) she left a note on a napkin asking the owners to pay her some money and her phone number. Instead, the ingrates called police.
Nobody ever calls the cops on Santa Claus, even though I’m confident many adults would prefer to have a Cleaning Fairy over a toy delivery-man with a compulsive laugh.
Interestingly, this woman claims she’s been doing this for a long time, and nobody ever reported her “crimes” before.
So there are people in Ohio who got home one day and found their houses had been sanitized and they didn’t think to call police? Did they say, “Well, finally someone cleaned behind the fridge,” or did they just start packing to move?
It’s that whole good-news, bad-news thing: Hey, someone broke into your house but they left it better than it was before. That’s disturbing for a variety of reasons.
Also, how did she know which houses to go to? Does the Cleaning Fairy have an address like the North Pole where slobs can write letters? “Dear Fairy, I have this stubborn ring around my bathtub...”
But the Ohio Cleaning Fairy is not the only one with this kind of behavior. A friend of mine recently got a job working the night shift at a convenience store in a dodgy part of Dallas. He told me this story last time we got together:
“Around 2 a.m. this woman came into the store and asked to use the bathroom. She was in there for more than 45 minutes when a Dallas cop came by to get some coffee. I told him about the woman who’d been in the restroom a really long time. So he went to the door and knocked and identified himself. The woman opened the door dressed in knee pads and protective clothing and she was scrubbing down the bathroom with her own cleaners and brushes. She didn’t explain, she just packed up her stuff and left. The next morning, my boss praised me for doing such a good job on the bathroom. I didn’t tell him the truth.”
Yeah, I wouldn’t have told him either. I would have asked for a raise.
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Janet Jacobs is City Editor of the Corsicana Daily Sun. Her column appears on Saturdays. She may be reached via email at jjacobs@corsicanadailysun.com. Want to “Soundoff” to this article? Email: soundoff@corsicanadailysun.com
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Janet Jacobs is City Editor of the Corsicana Daily Sun.
Discussion
Cleaning Fairy is sweeping new trend
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