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People suck

My mother is back to being unemployed thanks to people being giant assholes. Our state's unemployment rate is over 10%, and she is soooo going to end up living with me. With me. Husband said she's not living with him, that I have to take her with me to the new town if she ends up losing her house. Ugh.

Anyway, the wife, who had been doing all the correspondence with my mother, didn't even have the balls to tell her they changed their minds about hiring her. The husband emailed her today, and only after mom emailed the wife again to follow-up since she hadn't heard anything back from her since last week. Mom was so upset. She really liked the wife, and immediately liked the babies when she met them, and was so excited about the nanny job. But she's pretty sure the husband didn't like her when they met, and she thought he was a bit of a creep. He's probably thinking a nanny should be co-ed eye candy, not middle-aged grandmothers, but who knows.

So, whatever. There was only an oral contract, no written one, although there are emails back and forth discussing terms of employment. And of course, there's detrimental reliance, blah blah blah. Right now she's still drawing unemployment, so hopefully she'll be able to find something before it runs out. She still told the guy she would be talking to her lawyer though (which will be my boss dude, ha), and reiterated how they had a contract and how he was breaching it. Hopefully it'll make him sweat some. You just don't go around offering people jobs, telling them, "oh, please don't look for any other jobs, you have a job with us," and then four months later, be like, "oh, never mind." Employment law is at-will. There'd be no issue if she'd worked for them for one day and they were like, yeah, we don't like you, you're fired. But the fact that she hadn't started yet makes it a different story. So, we'll see. Not really digging that my first foray into employment law is dealing with my mother's drama.

It's just, people suck. If you make someone a job offer, and they stop looking for jobs relying on that, in the middle of a terrible recession, you don't just get to change your mind on a whim. That makes you a colossal douchebag. But as I told my mom, if they're big enough douchebags to do this to you, you don't want to work for them anyway.

Regardless, I'm tired of assholes. It's hard enough to get through life as it is, why do people have to go out of their way to be shitty to other people? I try to be nice to people, I'm much too afraid of the karmic fallout if I'm not.

Full post as published by Knocked Up (and in Law School) on August 12, 2009 (boomark / email).