Cathy G.

Cathy worked for our family for seven weeks before simply not showing one day, without notification. Had my husband not been working from home that day, our 3, 5, and 7 year-olds would have been left stranded. When we finally reached Cathy, late that evening, she claimed to have been in the hospital, and that "my phone was taken away from me". Cathy was a no-show each of the several days after when she and we agreed she would return to work, until we finally fired her. Cathy claimed one ailment to us and another to the family with whom we shared her; we have our suspicions as to the real cause... Prior to her disappearance, we were pleased with Cathy's care of our boys, who quickly warmed to her. For that reason, we kept Cathy on despite being quite unhappy with her work as a housekeeper. Cathy would regularly leave work half-finished, in a manner that undermined its value (e.g., leaving washed/folded laundry on the floor, where the dog would then get into it). We also had two episodes that led us to question Cathy's integrity. On a shopping run for our family, Cathy made a small purchase for her own consumption with our credit card without flagging it to us or offering to reimburse. On another shopping trip she purchased items different than what we had requested, then claimed that these were pursuant to our instructions until confronted with a copy of the shopping list she'd not known we had (whereupon she admitted having known she'd substituted in order to avoid effort). While we did not fire her for these episodes, thinking that our demonstration of close oversight would avoid repeats, we now regret that. Despite our repeated requests that Cathy leave our car key at our house when she was off duty, she insisted on keeping it on her key chain, where it remained overnight and on weekends. After her no-show, she repeatedly promised to return the key or permit us to pick up, both during her time off for "recovery" and after we'd let her go. Later this morphed to a promise to put the key in the mail. When it did not come, she explained that she had been "too busy" but would put in the mail the following weekend; we now accept that it will never come. Though a relatively small matter ($400+tax) relative to all we spent on Cathy, it's one more way in which she demonstrated absolute disregard for our family.