A Walk in Her Shoes

A Walk in Her Shoes

Kim and I did what we always do on Thursday morning, we found an excuse to absent ourselves from our house so that the cleaning crew could do their thing without having to work around us. I think it bothers them less than it bothers us because watching others clean your personal space is less than comfortable no matter who they are. We use the time to do our errands with Betty in her seat and, in the case of this morning, to give Kim a chance to drive and get used to the new car. It’s fun watching her figure out the new features of the new rig like the heads-up display and having our phone calls cause our kids’ pictures show up on the screen when we call them. We called my daughter Carolyn after going through the Panda Express drive-through to pick up an early Chinese food lunch (I do enjoy Panda Express).

Kim told me about something that Carolyn had experienced the day before and I decided we needed to rag on her about it. She had gone through a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through for an iced coffee and been told that the fellow before her in line had paid for her three-dollar coffee. It seems that Dunkin’ Donuts had been experiencing quite a string of these “pay-it-backwards” gestures that day and the clerk said they had a real string going. That’s when the clerk asked her if she wanted to pay for the guy behind her in the queue. She said, “sure” whereupon he told her the guy behind her had bought a raft of donuts totaling fifteen dollars. She was suddenly flummoxed, not knowing how to handle the situation. She didn’t want to break the karmic string of good deeds underway, but an extra twelve dollars seemed like a big, unexpected expense, so she hesitated. The window clerk shrugged and said she didn’t need to pay for it, she was free to take her free iced coffee and leave. Neither option seemed right and I guess she didn’t think about the option of paying only part of the other guy’s tab. So, in a flustered state she gave the clerk a $20 bill and paid the donut guy’s freight not knowing what he in turn would do for the person behind him. My bet is that she goes to McDonalds for iced coffee from now on.

When we got home it was still early and the cleaning crew was still hard at work, so Kim and I went out to our patio to sit in the shade on this lovely 80 degree day and eat a leisurely lunch of Panda Express Chinese food with Betty hopping between us trying to scavenged some spare MSG from us. I love this patio on days like this and I just happened to have my iPad with me, so I stayed here after Kim had finished and gone inside for some cabaret call or another. I was just puttering around with emails and such when Isabel, the capo of our housecleaning crew came out the patio door from the house. I like Isabel. She is always friendly and she vacillated between speaking to me in her very good English and occasional Spanish since she has discovered that I am reasonably proficient at it (truth be told her English is better than my Spanish).

Isabel is one of the people who we knew that had contracted a bad case of COVID and had to even be on a ventilator at home for a while. She was out from work for almost two months, but seems to have fully recovered now. When this whole Pandemic began we had stopped the house cleaning for a few months anyway, but then have gradually resumed it. Isabel always has her crew masked and gloved for their sake and the sense of ease for her clients. Today was the first time I saw her unmasked for almost a year. I asked her how she was doing and what ensued was a long conversation out on the patio about a whole range of topics.

We spoke about the economy and particularly the labor market in her business. I learned that Isabel, who is verging on age 62, moved here with her family when she was fourteen. I suspect she was illegal back in 1973 because she said she and her family started out here living in Kit Carson Park in Escondido for over a month before wrangling a place to live. She tells me that it was hard for her to focus on school because she was always drawn to trying to help her family earn the money to live. She stayed in school until age eighteen. I didn’t ask about nor do I care about any degrees she did or did not receive, nor, for that matter, about whether she obtained legal resident status, which I suspect she has. She has raised two boys (one hers and one adopted) who are respectively a lawyer in L.A. and a car rental manager in Riverside. After forty-four years of hard work, including one successful bout with cancer and another with COVID, she has set a timeframe of another five years before she retires.

We discussed her work and her girls. She, like most small businesses in the area, recruit from the Mexican and Central American illegal labor pool. She helps them make a decent living and helps them get towards their legal status (another reason I suspect she has legal status), Furthermore, she says she is grooming one woman in particular that has been with her for five years, since she was eighteen, to take over the business gradually in five years. She has no illusions about selling her franchise even though she has many loyal long-time clients like us (she has been with us for nine+ years). She feels very fortunate about her life, though I suspect that there was far less luck than good attitude and work, and just wants to help other young women make their way as she has as well as serving her clients well as she exits.

We talked about the qualities that make for a good solid small business and agreed that they key (especially so in a service business) is to have good people. To get and keep good people she has always felt that she needs to pay them well and treat them with the highest respect. She is a classic Theory Y manager though I doubt she has ever heard the term. She believes in the Golden Rule of doing onto others as you would have them do unto you. Is that because she is a good Catholic, as most of her heritage suggests? No, I think it is simply that she is a good human being who understands the importance of paying people a living wage and treating them well. I didn’t bother asking her what she pays her people, that is her business. But I am certain that whatever it is, it’s more than many of the more flinty-eyed versions of herself that exist, pay their people. She explained that she picks up and drops off every single employee at their home since many do not yet have cars of their own. She said others do that as well, but charge each employee for that privilege. That feels more like a Company Store program than a commissary to help support employee needs and breed loyalty.

Isabel strikes me as a good business woman. She has all the basic tenets. She has good customer service skills and is both personable and communicative. She also cares about her employees and feels a responsibility that would be admirable for all employers. She is a long-term thinker and not transactionally driven to do whatever is best for her pocketbook at the moment. This is what breeds success. I had the opportunity today to take a walk in her shoes and must say, I am impressed as a businessperson, but more so as a person who values humanity.