Nanny Gets My Goat
Our nanny quit at short notice last week, leaving after four months to take a better-paid job (and presumably one where she'd be exposed to fewer tantrums. Then again, she's going to be a secretary ...). Her departure put a serious kink in my plans to finish the feature I'm working on by the appointed deadline. It is undeniably tough to interview respected academics with a pair of attention-seeking littlies in tow.
Good babysitters are hard to find (you could always end up with someone like this cretin, facing court today). Nonetheless, I appeared to get lucky on the first go: a replacement child minder had been interviewed on Monday, offered the job and given her start date for this morning, meaning I'd only lose two working days in all the disruption. I'd easily make that up.
And so I would have done, had the new girl not made one small, but basic error.
She didn't turn up.
Waited an hour (it's her first day, she might have misjudged how long it'd take to get here on the train), then called her. Voicemail. No response after two hours and I was resigned to a day spent supervising the kids at the local park and making hidey-holes out of furniture and blankets. For me, not them.
The experience was topped off when I returned from the park to find the wing mirror on our car redistributed across the road in hundreds of glittery pieces from where a bin van had hit it. Not, of course, the fault of our absentee care-giver, but that didn't stop the illogical, unreasonable side of my personality blaming her for it.
Still, the day wasn't a complete loss - I did manage to make progress with a rep for Perth band End of Fashion and an A&R man from a major record label, both of whom have agreed to answer my doubtless incisive questions for the feature.
Meanwhile, there's still no word from the missing teen. One thing is stopping me from taking the proverbial hatchet to her on the site for the internet agency where we found her. There is, of course, the possibility that she always intended to turn up, but something happened to leave her hospitalised or worse. I mean, I'd feel awful if she'd been on her way here and she'd been knocked down by something.
An irate previous employer, perhaps.
Good babysitters are hard to find (you could always end up with someone like this cretin, facing court today). Nonetheless, I appeared to get lucky on the first go: a replacement child minder had been interviewed on Monday, offered the job and given her start date for this morning, meaning I'd only lose two working days in all the disruption. I'd easily make that up.
And so I would have done, had the new girl not made one small, but basic error.
She didn't turn up.
Waited an hour (it's her first day, she might have misjudged how long it'd take to get here on the train), then called her. Voicemail. No response after two hours and I was resigned to a day spent supervising the kids at the local park and making hidey-holes out of furniture and blankets. For me, not them.
The experience was topped off when I returned from the park to find the wing mirror on our car redistributed across the road in hundreds of glittery pieces from where a bin van had hit it. Not, of course, the fault of our absentee care-giver, but that didn't stop the illogical, unreasonable side of my personality blaming her for it.
Still, the day wasn't a complete loss - I did manage to make progress with a rep for Perth band End of Fashion and an A&R man from a major record label, both of whom have agreed to answer my doubtless incisive questions for the feature.
Meanwhile, there's still no word from the missing teen. One thing is stopping me from taking the proverbial hatchet to her on the site for the internet agency where we found her. There is, of course, the possibility that she always intended to turn up, but something happened to leave her hospitalised or worse. I mean, I'd feel awful if she'd been on her way here and she'd been knocked down by something.
An irate previous employer, perhaps.
posted by Pete Kempshall at 9:28 PM
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