I guess if you have more money than you know what to do with, then I there’s some leeway in how much you can get away with, right? I mean, you’re rich, so who cares what people think, right? Well… I think your support staff and employees might have a thought or two about that.
Someone on AskReddit asked if there were any gardeners, maids, au pairs and nanny’s that had some crazy stories about their rich employers.
There’s being loaded with money, then there’s being loaded with insanity. The two sometimes go hand in hand.
“Helped my mother in law who was a maid once with a very large mansion in NC. Beautiful house, amazing architecture. They traveled the world all the time. The kitchen had old old appliances from the 70’s, the wife’s bathroom had a broken toilet seat that was duct taped together. The wife did not rewear her underwear. We were not to go in the basement. I peaked down there, there were clothes three foot deep in the basement where she took off her clothes and just threw them down there. Thousands of pairs of underwear. Very weird people.” – 2greenToes
“Worked for a beverage distribution place in a very ritzy resort area for awhile. Guys assistant shows up and says he needs a pallet of Evian for his bosses house. No problem. We load it on the truck and drive it up to his house.
After unloading we ask him where he wants it and he leads us into the garage and asks if we can help unload it. So we start downstacking and carry cases of this shit into what I thought would be the kitchen or pantry. Nope. Straight through the house to the back deck.
He was filling his hot tub with Evian.” – Odell_Strangehams
“They have a holiday home in the south pacific and have a housekeeper clean it three times a week yet they only visit 3-4 times a year. When they’re not visiting, no one lives there.” – Pregnancyinsomnia
“The wife is a hoarder and will often take way more samples than any normal person. She always makes sure to take all the shampoo/soap etc from hotel rooms and if she passes the housekeeping trolley, will grab as many as she can from there too. Yet she never uses them. They have a whole bathroom cupboard dedicated to samples.” – Pregnancyinsomnia
“Wasn’t really behind closed doors or anything but I delivered furniture to a very rich person’s mega-house once only to discover, as we were going from room to room, a few rooms were completely bare and empty. I didn’t really register it at first because I figured we would be putting furniture in there with the load we were delivering but that didn’t happen and I mentioned to a co-worker how the one room was bigger than my living room and completely bare and he said “maybe they’re getting stuff during another round?” and the guy heard and said “nah that room is staying empty – I have no use for it. Same with the others too.”
I couldn’t really wrap my head around a lot of things after that. First off to be rich enough to afford a house like that, then on top of that, purposefully have parts of your house go completely unused because you don’t care about them. Like…why even buy a house that big then? Why overdo it and leave some of it unused? Why not just buy what you need and use it all? Rich people are weird.” – DaveDavidsen
“I worked for an insanely wealthy woman in CT, and she was just as crazy as she was rich. She was elderly when I worked for her as a ‘personal assistant’ – my job was mostly researching the location of the shroud of christ, yes, the shroud of christ. She was a devout catholic and she had a slew of creepy, religious freaks working for her too. She’d call me on speaker phone first thing every morning from her room and I’d have to go through every email (including spam) that she got, took me a few weeks to realize why she was always grunting during our interaction – it was her morning dump routine. She had some sort of skin condition that covered her entire body with open sores that constantly oozed and flaked – it was so bad that her maid changed her sheets 3 times a day, as that’s where she conducted most of her business.
Besides the strange religious employees, 3 secretaries and maid, her mentally handicapped daughter lived with her mother still and somehow her boyfriend moved in and her mother was tricked into signing the rights to her daughters boyfriend, so he was there too, and he was also mentally handicapped. One of her workers told me that her daughter was born with one leg shorter than the other, so her mom had her shorter leg amputated and it’s what drove her daughter to insanity. Crazy times.” – HippyDippy420
“Throughout high school I worked as a landscaper for a guy that was worth over 2 billion (according to the internet) every summer.. The very timid rich man would leave every day as I arrived, and I would always be terrified to talk to him.. Until the first time he initiated a conversation with me and I soon realized he was far more nervous than me, which I found odd.. After that, he stopped leaving for work until an hour or two after I arrived..
Thought nothing of it, until one day I was close enough to the house to see him and his wife, naked, and while she was fondling his junk they were both just looking out the window at me.. And out of denial (I guess?), I stopped paying attention to the windows as it likely happened for the following 2 years I was there.. But at 14-18, it’s hard to turn down $1,000 a week… cash… And to be honest, I didn’t even mind if they did it everyday..
Apparently it was mutually beneficial to everyone involved.” – EthanBradberry727
“I was a nanny for a really wealthy family. Their public face was polished and put together. My second day on the job, I noticed that there were really intricate alarms and lock systems on each of the kids’ bedroom doors. It turns out the dad was a registered sex offender. The alarm systems would turn on and lock the kids’ doors at 9:30 pm. The mom had to use a special code to open them if the kids needed her during the night. They turned out to be a really fucked up family, so I was only a nanny for a year.” – cohen14722
“Growing up my mother would clean houses for wealthy individuals. There was an elderly widowed woman with large all white poodles. She insisted that my mother clean them with bleach. She would provide 2 gallons of bleach each week.
My mother never did bleach them, she just poured out the bleach in the tub.” – ousalsa
“The most bizarre was this newly rich young family in Vienna. The bed time routine for the kids (aged 3 and 7) included basically a spa treatment for both. I haven’t seen that amount of products in a child’s bathroom (they each had their own) in my life. The poor 7 year old girl had next to no hair on her head but I was required to slather her in the most expensive adult shampoo, conditioner, hair mask, hair oil, and some other things I didn’t recognise – every night.
They only had one tiny box of toys and time spent playing was set up for 30 minutes after they brushed their teeth. Dinner was normally a bland fish fillet and a ton of salad. Not a grain of sugar anywhere in the house. Hot cocoa was made with skim milk and pure high quality cocoa – no sweetness to it whatsoever, it tasted awful.
They had time to explain EVERYTHING to me the first time I was there and I received an inch thick file with lists and procedures to follow. What they didn’t mention was that the older girl was still wearing diapers at night. It made for a very awkward conversation with the child and I only hope I was sensitive enough to not cause her any future trauma.
Very, VERY weird.” – bananamedley
“My dad is an electrician and has worked in some very rich houses. He did a job in one where the couple only drank very posh fresh coffee. Fair enough, who wouldn’t? But they had a cleaner who was permitted one cup of coffee each day, but not their coffee. She had her own separate coffee, but it wasn’t even a decent, if cheaper, brand. It was the cheapest possible sort to buy, Asda smartprice instant or something. If a person comes to my flat, whether they are a friend or the plumber, they are a guest and they will drink whatever tea or coffee I drink because I see them as equals. My dad has told me that some of the stingiest people he knows are also the wealthiest.” – The LibrarianOokOok
“My sister is a nanny for an NBA player and his wife. The wife called my sister at 9 PM to come to their house for an “urgent” matter. When my sister gets to their house, the wife tells her take the trash out. That’s it. My sister drove an hour round trip to take out the trash.
She has so many ridiculous stories about this family, but that one is my go-to.
My sister signed an NDA, so I’m pretty sure I have to keep his name under wraps unless I want a shake-down. Let’s just say he’s in his 20’s and he seems like a decent guy. His wife is just an entitled, raging b**tch.” – WhoReadsfor400
“I was a live in grounds keeper for a wealthy eccentric for a while. He had three cars from old movies in his garage. One was from a bond film. They were covered in layers of dust and trash. One of them was a convertible that had the top caved in by trash. Awesome cars just totally neglected and forgotten.
He also had a favorite dog kept frozen in a meat cooler, surrounded by decade old frozen food items. I know about this stuff because the garage is where my equipment was. I only saw inside the proper house once (I lived in the keepers housing). It was full of all this crystal, pewter, and silver tableware and decorative stuff. Easily hundreds of thousands of dollars in items just laying around in piles, like a fucking pirate movie.
He was rarely there anyway. Once every three months he would swing in to pay bills and take care of other shit, then go back to France where he lived with his wife.
A lesser man than I couldve made out like a bandit just taking things here and there. The guy wouldn’t have even noticed. I just did my job though. Even improved his property, because the guy before me was a lazy stoner. I was a stoner too, but I was the busy body kind.” – dis_ABLED
“The family I worked for had a nanny. Youngest daughter forced her nanny to push her around the entire property while she just emitted a high C note. The property was hundreds of acres and they were at it for quite a while. The breadwinner is the husband. Can’t say what he does as I believe he wouldn’t like that. Either way he was a menace to the trees. Would need work breaks so he’d grab a pole saw and go to town on random trees. Then he’d get bored and tell me to clear the piles he made and “pretty the trees back up”. This was also their 365 acre weekend home complete with dam generated power that took them off grid.
They had a mansion in the big city, cottage in cottage country, and this property in farm country.” – JustHereToConfirmIt
“I was a nanny for an affluent family. They had a beautiful home and nice vehicles and the kids all had lots of toys and new clothes but while doing laundry one day I had to take a load of moms cloths out of the dryer and every single pair of her panties had multiple holes in them. Not like gnaw holes lol but worn out most tattered panties I’ve ever seen holes.
Got curious and looked in her under garment drawer and this was par for the course and not just period panties. She was like a major high up in a huge company and her panties looked worse than I would imagine a homeless person wearing.” – mnmommy
“My mom first came to germany as an au pair for a family of 5, the mother was a doctor and the dad was an engineer and they had three teenage boys, they were not insanely rich but my mom grew up in a village in rural Thailand so it was definitely a different dimension for her. She got up every day at 5 to make breakfast for the whole family when one morning, the father comes down the stairs butt naked, followed by the mom, fully nude as well, and the kids who were also wearing nothing. They apparently spend a couple of days like this in the summer, imagine how shocked my mom must have been being a little 21 year old asian girl in a foreign country, having to serve a fully naked family…” – fuckvyron
“Once when I was a nanny, I was housesitting while the family was out of the country. The refrigerator in my apartment broke, so I packed up some perishables and brought them to the family’s house to store them until the landlord could fix it. When I brought my groceries back to my place, I realized I had accidentally grabbed something that wasn’t mine from the cheese drawer.
It was a gallon ziploc bag. Inside that was a smaller ziploc bag. Inside that was a bundle of wax paper. Inside that was a bundle of plastic wrap. Inside that was another bundle of plastic wrap. Inside that was a bundle of tinfoil. Seven layers deep, I found an old lump of fruitcake.” – [deleted]
“The family that regularly bought complicated Lego sets for their five year old, and then assembled them for him because they were too complicated for a five year old, while he looked on and complained they weren’t doing it fast enough, still receive periodic installments of my pity and contempt. Like, dude: he’s not learning anything except that Mommy and Daddy were put on the planet to please him, and he’s not actually learning anything from the toys. They also bought the kid new toys once a week or so. I just…I can’t with some parents.” – MySecretLair
Rich people are weird.