LLadró Automn Romance 02

I'm not sure if this is the most expensive thing that I've broken over the course of my entire life, but at the time it was beyond my imagination (and bank account) to afford to replace the thing that I broke.

It was a summer home from college and I was employed as a Merry Maid, cleaning private homes and sweating my butt off in the process (can you say free workout??) I was new, and looking back, not nearly as careful as I should have been while cleaning another person's home. The interesting thing about this job is that once you had a week of training you were pretty much left unsupervised.

As a Merry Maid we went out in teams of two. The work was split up into "wet work" and "dry work". Being new, I was assigned the dry work because it was easier in many respects. I was a bit overzealous and trying to prove my worth by being speedy - you made more money if you were done before the allotted time on the contract, otherwise you were paid $5.00 an hour (the year was 1987) I was working with an experienced maid who was about my mom's age, and trying to keep up on my end of the deal so I wouldn't cost her the bonus pay.

While dusting the dining room, I reached over the statues on the buffet to wipe down the mirror and the sleeve of my white t-shirt caught the tip of the statue while I pulled away. It was almost in slow motion, or so it felt, as that two foot tall statue came crashing down to the floor and broke.

The statue was a Lladro, the milky white and blue collection from Spain. At that time they were fairly rare and fairly expensive.

I wanted to puke...or run away.

The owner of the house, and the statue, was far from understanding and informed my employer that it was basically irreplaceable since it was from her father.

In the end, Merry Maids paid to replace it for it's retail value (thanks to the arrangement of our maids being licensed and bonded) and I was still able to keep my minimum wage job for the summer to earn money for the coming fall semester. They didn't even withhold anything from my paycheck. Whew!

(a few days later I backed out of a driveway after finishing another job and ran over their mailbox...it was a bad week)