The Nanny Diaries, Pt. 2

Monday, November 22, 4:30pm

Note to readers -- before reading this entry, if you don't like spoilers, you might want to catch yourself up here.

Oh my God, Diary.

Right now, I'm wondering something. I'm wondering why our family was cursed when it comes to childcare.

Seriously, what's the deal? Did we piss off an omnipotent nanny in a former life? We've never found a sitter we liked who didn't up and move to another country within three months (it's happened twice now). Our baby was expelled from day care. And now...now this.

When I finally got in touch with Agency Owner, I had a mouthful to tell her.

I'd gone over each invoice, and what I'd discovered had only added to the dismay I was already feeling. To reiterate, we'd previously agreed on a schedule of 25 hours each week. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she works from 8am-1pm. On Thursdays, the days I work at my grandfather's office, that schedule shifts to 11am-4pm.

Our nanny was not only logging each day she'd begun work at 7:30am -- she was consistently tacking on hours to the back end. While leaving each day at 1pm, she was reporting having left at 2:30pm, or 3:30pm, or 5pm.

On one particular Thursday, she still logged having arrived at 7:30 and reported her departure time as 5 -- a total of 9.5 hours of work.

The following day, she reported arriving at 7:30am and leaving at 3:30pm.

The Monday following -- 7:30am, 3:30pm.

Owner was stunned when I told her. "There must be a miscommunication," she insisted.  She explained her method of tracking hours: each of her nannies, 30+ in all, are instructed to send her a text message each day when they leave their employer's house, reporting how many hours they've worked that day. Once a week, a courier makes the rounds with invoices, meeting each nanny at her place of business and having her sign off on the previous week's invoice. She claimed it had been a fail safe method for years, that to date she'd never had a problem with it.

"Maybe you can sit down and talk with her about it, to work things out," she suggested.

And me, Little Miss Nice Girl, for once I was not tempted to back down. This was not 30 minutes here and there we were haggling over -- it was hours of extra time. Every day.

I told her I did not want the nanny back to our house ever again. And I wanted our house key returned. The Owner, clearly upset, told me she'd look into the matter and call me back.

The last time ties were severed with a childcare provider, it hit me pretty hard. When Bunny Day Care called me up that day to tell me that they could not longer take care of my daughter, that I needed to come pick her up immediately, my response was tears, humiliation, worry. This time was different. It was on MY terms. We'd been taken advantage of, and that was humiliating, sure -- but this time, it was me calling the shots, bringing the situation to light. I'd felt I couldn't trust her, though I didn't know exactly why, and now that feeling was being validated. I felt almost jubilant.

I walked Sadie to the park. Everything was in vibrant focus. I called our sitter, asked her if she'd be willing to begin full-time nanny duties immediately. She agreed.

At the park, Sadie played with a six year old boy who was gentle and sweet with her, but concerned over her inability to speak. His mother explained that he was autistic, that he himself hadn't begun to speak until he was four year old, that she'd been receiving help through the Regional Center for years and only recently had stopped beating herself up over aspects of life as a parent that she'd realized were simply out of her control. It brought me back to the days when I was sick with worry over Sadie and her development, feeling helpless, powerless, stupid. Now I'd learned that this, along with sleepless nights and teething and potentially unethical nannies, was only one of a bucketful of unexpected curveballs that new parenthood throws at you.

On the way back home, Agency Owner called me back.

"Well, you were right," she said. "And I feel sick about it. Do you want to know how I caught her?"

"How?"

"I got a text from her an hour ago, reporting that she worked from 7:30am-3:30pm today." She paused. "I knew that wasn't true, because you and I had our conversation at 1:30pm, and she obviously wasn't there."

"She left at 1pm today." I listened to her go on for awhile, telling me how she'd called back my nanny and asked her about the discrepancy. The first excuse given was that she'd sent the text at 1pm, but that it hadn't come through until 3:30. The second was that she'd "forgotten her glasses" and mistakenly typed 3:30pm instead of 1.

She doesn't wear glasses.

She maintained her innocence, claiming that my mother and I were setting up a new company, requiring her to work extra hours, all of which had been approved.

Ultimately, the excuses were meaningless. I don't believe she's a bad person. I believe she's a lazy person who chose to take advantage of an opportunity when it presented itself. Each week, when she wasn't called out for the previous week's fudged hours, she saw an opportunity to fudge a few additional hours in the week to come. Each week, my own laziness prevented me from checking that email which would have alerted me to the fact that I was being ripped off.

At any rate...she's gone. She has a new wardrobe full of my old clothes and a stomach full of pralines and peanut butter to remember us by, but still I feel sad. She genuinely adored Sadie, and Sadie liked her, too. She was never anything but nice to me, even when she was scamming me right under my nose.

We're still changing the locks.