I have always believed that when something is too good to be true, it probably is. That’s the reason I approach seasonal offers, giveaways, and the like with a sense of wariness. However, I fell long and hard in one experience. I had hired a domestic help when I moved to our new home back in 2015.
It was my first experience as an employer and I didn’t know the nuances of being the boss for a domestic help. I decided to just be compassionate and honest with my expectations. It seemed to be working fine and despite my neighbors having issues with the same maid, I didn’t have much to complain other than the occasional issue of her taking off on many days without informing. I took it in my stride and just warned her to inform me when she takes off. I have almost never cut her pay, have given her an advance on her payment whenever she needed it for her family, even loaned her a significant amount when she claimed that her son had met with an accident and she needed money for hospital expenses. I never gave her extra work, was sympathetic when she was ill etc. Overall, we had a very cordial employer-employee relationship.
Over a period of time, I noticed her dropping work from other houses and expected her to do the same with us as she had gotten a big contract of cleaning the corridors of the entire apartment. I understood that it would get her the salary she needed in one go, without having to go to 7-8 houses and build up her salary. It also meant intense effort for 2-3 hours of her day but after that she gets the entire day off. So I expected her to tell me that she cannot continue working for me and had resigned to the fact that I had to get another maid. I was also a bit sad because she was the best at what she did. She used to wash the vessels sparkling clean and she cleaned every corner of the house she could reach. While many of friends kept cribbing about the quality of work that their househelps did, I considered myself lucky to have found someone who cleaned the place better than I could. In any case, she never dropped the work at my place and I assumed that it was because she found it easy enough to complete along with the apartment cleaning work and also because I was never very strict with her in terms of leave and other issues.
I should have known better. What I didn’t know was that she was maintaining a very calm and low profile with me and probably took extra effort to keep me impressed (this is my guess, could be wrong) while she was skimming money from us. We had found ourselves second guessing that we had less money in our wallets but assumed that we had missed monitoring our expenses. This last month, we had started logging our expenses to the penny and when we found ourselves in the same position for more than 3 times in a row, we knew something was amiss. What followed was a cat and mouse game and eventually I gathered evidence, confronted, and fired her. When I spoke to my neighbors, I learnt that she had done similar things in other houses and got fired from there.
Now, I don’t know how long she has been stealing from me – was it recent or was I a fool all these years but I am glad that it came to an end. And now I understood that there are other things to look for other than the quality of the work. For the past week, I felt so enraged that I was such a fool to have trusted her. But there is no point in crying now when it was really my mistake to have done so. So in all aspects of life, when something is too good to be true, it is.
Until later 🙂