Will Vacuum, Clean Toilets, Debug Windows

Will Vacuum, Clean Toilets, Debug Windows
In Asian cities, the new breed of household maid can do far more than
just scrub the floors
(Associated Press)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/11/19/financial1005EST0048.DTL&nl=fix

Janet Nevis Moreno, a maid in Hong Kong, does more than just clean house for her employer. Two months ago she cleaned the Blaster virus off the family computer. It was a little time-consuming, says Ms. Moreno, 32 years old, but easy -- and "more fun than washing dishes."

Ms. Moreno learned Microsoft Office and Power Point at a computer school in Hong Kong whose student body is mostly maids. The first lesson -- on how to turn computers on and off -- was terrifying, says Ms. Moreno, who comes from a farming community in the central Philippines. "I thought I would break it." Now she occasionally fills out Excel spreadsheets for her employers and gives their 9-year-old son computer lessons.

In the modern household, where computers are as common as vacuum cleaners, digital drudgery is becoming just another domestic chore. And since many people have about as much enthusiasm for cleaning out spam as they have for waxing floors, there's a growing demand for maids who do Windows as well as windows.

After staring at a computer at work, says Hong Kong Internet entrepreneur Paul Luciw, "the last thing I want to do is look at it some more when I get home." His maid, Sally Pasuquin Yip, 47, irons shirts, cleans the bathroom and uploads digital photos on Mr. Luciw's computer. She also does data entry he doesn't have time for. "It's just housework," shrugs Mrs. Yip.

Mrs. Yip, a former secretary from the Philippines who came to Hong Kong as a domestic servant 14 years ago, cleans part time for several families. For $7.70 an hour, she'll dust, baby-sit, fill out online forms and print address labels. She sometimes stops typing in order to wipe smudgy screens. "I can't concentrate if things are dirty," she says.

In the U.S., such chores are sometimes filled by technical-support companies that make house calls. "We are like a maid-service company for electronics," says Ted Banucci, who runs the Gadget Helper, in Campbell, Calif. The company gets about 30 calls a week, and while the majority of jobs, such as setting up a home PC network, require technical expertise, demand for menial computer chores is increasing, says Mr. Banucci. "I'm not kidding you. Sometimes we get called on just to flip a switch or two," he says.

But in affluent Asian cities, including Hong Kong and Singapore, where it's common for middle-class families to have full-time domestic help, basic computer tasks are often performed by the same women who dust the furniture.

Computer courses catering specifically to domestics have mushroomed in Hong Kong. The maids-only computer courses offered by the Hong Kong YMCA have been so popular that the Y has increased the number of classes to 11 from one since the program was introduced in 1994. This year it added three new courses taught in the Indonesian language Bahasa, which is the native tongue of many maids in Hong Kong. Many of these students are called on to do spreadsheets for household budgets, design and maintain family Web sites and perform Internet searches for the children's schoolwork, says Moira McPherson, who directs the training courses at the Y.

Demand is so brisk at Innovative Digital Limited, a small computer center that offers chat-room services and Windows XP courses, that the company had to move to larger quarters just three months after it opened, says owner Rick Cabanatan. Most of the students are household help seeking to learn computer skills. Many are just beginners.

In Shenzhen, China, just across the border from Hong Kong, computer-literate domestics can earn $225 a month, about 50 percent more than the going rate for maids and about what recent university graduates can earn in white-collar jobs. Currently, the Shenzhen Marriage and Family Service Center, an employment agency, has a waiting list of about 30 employers seeking computer-literate maids. "We have more requests than we can fill," says director Zhang Tie Yi. But he says that of the 800 maids who have enrolled at his center, only 20 have had the necessary typing skills or other basics needed to start learning computer tasks.

Some computer-proficient maids hope that their new skills will help them escape their menial jobs. Josclyn Polic, who is 43 and from the Philippines, took a computer course at the Hong Kong YMCA five years ago. She mostly used her skills to order groceries online and download recipes for the frequent dinner parties thrown by her employer, Jeremy Barr. Ms. Polic had a wide repertoire of Chinese and English dishes, and her steak-and-kidney pie, says management consultant Mr. Barr, "was simply lovely."

She left her recipes on a disk as a parting gift for the Barr family before leaving for Canada, where she parlayed her computer skills into a job as a nurse's aide.