Here’s something you don’t know about me. I once worked as a maid.

For several months in my late teens, I took a job working evenings for an employment agency. The job was cleaning offices. It was dull and tedious, but I secretly enjoyed it. Like Molly, the simple-minded protagonist of Nita Prose’s The Maid (see “Worth Reading,” below), I enjoyed restoring those human habitats to “perfection.”

And of the many duties of an office maid, the one I enjoyed the most was the one that I should have enjoyed the least: cleaning the bathrooms. I can give you two answers as to why that was.

First, because the pleasure I got from cleaning was dependent on the difference between the before and after. And bathrooms provide the greatest contrast.

Second, as the oldest boy in a family of eight children, my Saturday chore was to clean our one-and-a-half baths. I once complained about this degrading chore being mine and not my siblings. To which my mother replied, “But, Mark. There is no one that can clean a bathroom like you.”

Looking back at that now, I believe she was humoring me. But as a seven- or eight-year-old, I took it as a compliment. (I’ve always been a sucker for compliments.)