Monday, July 14, 2008

Vacation Aftermath

While we were off having fun, our babysitter was busily frightening the neighbors and calling the police. Of course, we were blissfully unaware of this until I contacted Geetha to see how things were going with the house-sitting...

The gory details are these. We had a standing appointment with our sitter for two Friday evenings per month. She scheduled them how she liked, and if for some reason we could not use her services on a date she designated, we agreed on an alternate date for a "make-up."

Well, I didn't get her our vacation dates before she made up her July schedule. Oops. And of course she ended up scheduling herself for our house one of the days we were going to be gone. So, I sent e-mail saying that we'd be out of town from June 24-July 4 and proposed some make-up dates. In confirming our make-up date, I reminded her again that this was in lieu of the appointment she'd scheduled for the 27th.

You may be able to see where this is going...

While we were in Maine, in an area with almost no cell signal, the sitter called my cell phone several times to ask where we were. I got the messages at some point that was too late for me to really do anything about them (when we wandered in and out of signal range apparently) so I ignored them.

That was apparently a mistake. According to neighbors, one night around midnight the police were pounding on doors and borrowed a ladder to break in through the front window. Given how easy that was for them, we're leaving the front window locked from here on out. Good grief. Anyway, our neighbors all apparently huddled around outside while the police searched each floor of our home for evidence that we'd been murdered or abducted or eaten by dingoes.

Happily, that was a night that Geetha wasn't staying here. She arrived to care for critters and was met by anxious neighbors and a note from the police about their little "welfare check."

Given some of the issues around scheduling we'd been having, this seemed like as good a time as any to cut this sitter loose. I can't believe that, over the course of a few days, she did not once bother to check her calendar or mail from me for an explanation of why we weren't home. I like that the prospect of something horrible happening to us was the first conclusion, rather than the last.

Anybody have a sitter to recommend?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the other hand, you have caring neighbors who supported the police break-in and were concerned about you. It also freaked out my daughter big time to get the note from the police. She hadn't expected house-sitting for you to be so exciting.

Niki Naeve said...

yeha, I agree - nice to know someone cares enough to send int he cops, but maybe a double checking the email first might be a sensible course of action...

Trying ot imagine anything like that happening in our place in NYC...

SWE said...

It is nice to have caring neighbors. :) We also didn't expect house-sitting to be such an adventure or we'd have never inflicted it on family, that's for sure.

I'm glad Geetha was not sleeping here that night, as sound does not travel at all from the doorbell or front door to the guest room on the 3rd floor. Finding a note from the police on the kitchen table is one thing, having them wake you up from a sound sleep is another entirely...