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There’s an entire novel of manners lurking under the surface of this, particularly when paired up with this response.
For some bloggers, of course, the only point of the story is that it’s foolish to be too forthcoming with an employer about your personal stuff. (A point readily acknowledged by the blogger herself, in the comment thread here.) Other bloggers seem to grasp that there’s a bit more going on. Atrios highlights Pandagon commentor Jeff’s wry observation that evidently “an employee writing about her employer in a blog is enough to get her fired, but an employer writing about her employee in the New York Times is just journalism.” Jeff suggests we may be in the presence of something called “class issues”, which is of course impossible since America doesn’t have cla—, I mean cl—, I mean, you know, that word I can’t even type.
Interestingly, while you might get the impression from Helaine Olen’s Times piece that her former nanny was placarding the intarweb with overt discussions of Olen and her family, in fact the nanny never named any of them; indeed the blog didn’t even contain the blogger’s own full name. (In retrospect, the nanny/blogger appears to have been writing about the Olen clan rather less than Olen and her husband thought she was, but that’s a comic subplot.) By contrast, Olen was nowhere so circumspect:
I told my friends about the blog, and even my childless acquaintances were riveted. They called, begging for more details. “Did she wear the rose negligee, the pink see-through slip or the purple Empire-waisted gown?” demanded one after perusing a post on the proper outfit for first-time sex.
For a smart and nuanced discussion of all this, which digs past the obvious What-Did-You-Expect harrumphing into the much more interesting complicities, check out Bitch Ph.D. Do read the comments; they’re worth the extra time. Unsurprisingly, the nanny/blogger is a participant in that discussion, reacting reasonably to criticism and adding some interesting details to her own side of the story. It would be particularly interesting if Helaine Olen were to show up the conversation as well, but of course that’s never going to happen, and that fact is at the heart of all that’s transpired.
UPDATE: How did I miss these two killer posts from Majikthise?
Of course, Olen wasn’t really interested in friendship. She didn’t want to be the stodgy boss, but she didn’t want to be a real confidante either. What she really wanted was a pseudo-relationship that was all about her. When her manipulative pose got her into uncomfortable emotional territory, she eliminated the source of her discomfort without a second thought. Then she wrote a “reflective” essay about the situation in which she congratulates herself for recognizing her own motives, while taking for granted that her self-centered manipulative behavior was acceptable.
i was fascinated by this stuff. fyi, last week's modern love column was also rebutted by its subject, who is a better writer than the columnist.
that column sums up everything i loathe about a certain part of nyc/kind of journalism/and, while we're at it, new york magazine (even though it wasn't printed there, it could've been).
Thanks for acknowledging the comment threads; I rather pride myself on having some of the best commenters in blogland, and I think that if people don't read the comments, they're getting only half the value of my blog. Lucky me.
I have to wonder whether Olen's real problem was that the nanny wrote so little about Olen and her household. Or perhaps Olen realized that if she herself did a weblog, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as the nanny's.
How dare a twentysomething employee make Helaine Olen feel insecure?
Time to trot out my favorite quote from La Rochefoucauld: "We frequently forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore."
Dr. B., that's exactly how I feel about my own comment threads.
I just had an interesting discussion with my mother which was only sort of about this--she'd only read the Times piece, by the way. She is a person who is very much concerned with the people and the issues as they affect her (and me), and her point was the same as The News Blog: If she hadn't given the mother the link, the nanny could have saved a lot of trouble for everyone. She wanted to make sure I knew that and would be applying it in my own Internet life, and she wasn't concerned with the larger issues. She seemed to think I was (we were?) blowing this out of proportion.
At the same time, while I agree wholeheartedly with Majikthise's comments on the NYT article, I'm still having trouble with the nanny's decision to share her blog with her boss. I mean, it's one thing to talk about your work on a blog, and another thing to rant about your place of work on a blog your boss reads. I want to be clear: I don't think anyone should be fired for things they write on a blog, and I think the columnist's reasons for firing the nanny are atrocious. However, I don't see the difference here between the nanny criticizing her work on a blog her boss reads, and the nanny perhaps saying to her boss' face how much she dislikes working there. And I think that few people would rant in such a way to their employer. [Mind you, I have very limited experience in the workforce, and that experience I do have was in an office which I gather was somewhat unusually awesome, but still, I'd feel really uncomfortable discussing with an employer some of the things that nanny had blogged about.]
Sarah M, could you please notice that this isn't about the supposed injustice of the nanny getting canned?
How many times does she have to acknowledge that it was dumb to share her blog with her employer? Before we can talk about anything else?
Patrick: I don't think there's anything particularly surprising about a mother getting envious of a 20-something unmarried woman and then trying to retaliate against the younger woman however possible (in this case, then, firing serves the dual purpose of punishing the young woman and removing her from the older woman's presence, thus allowing the older woman to more easily repress her jealous feelings).
Yes, it's a quintessential comedy of manners and while its particulars are interesting (e.g., the whole idea of whether nannies need to be morally upright, and the idea that a young mother would be so torn between the desire to raise her kids and be a stupid 20-something again), it's not surprising that that's how the situation played itself out. What surprised me more was that the nanny didn't think of that when she choose to share her blog. (Also, and this isn't an original thought, I know, but the blogging/non-blogging gap, which the nanny I think didn't consider, is also intriguing, specifically in how comfortable the nanny apparently was in telling her boss about her personal life, but in how ultimately uncomfortable the boss felt about reading such details.)
You're right - this truly is a 21st century comedy of manners. There's a great deal of irony in the story, as well as exploitation of social position to exercise power over others.
Put this together with the excerable (sp?) Daniel Okrent's outing of the author of an impassioned if perhaps inappropriate cricital letter, and the NY Times seems to be a hub for these sorts of stories.
One way to keep from getting tangled up in this sort of thing is to hire au pairs from overseas, as my closest friends have done. If either of their nannies had blogs, they would have been in Swedish, and therefore safely inaccessible.
It does indeed feel as if we've entered a neo-Victorian era, only minus the airships. I mean, if we're going to have Victorian morals and social mores, can't we at least have a few passenger blimps?
Larry: That's not new, though. I vividly recall my sophomore year in high school reading a front-page Style Section essay by a senior who simultaneously decried the college-obsessed students of our school, then implied that she was the same, but better because she was self-aware. The article, of course, was entitled "Hey Yale, can this be my college essay?"
Everybody at school, however, understood that this was actually the capper in her application to Brown. I wonder if the title was deliberate or not.
I believe, though my memory is faulty, that she got in.
This is another reason why I stopped buying the NY Times.
WTF were the editors thinking when they gave Olen space to publish this crap?
Five or ten million people in this country have blogs: yes, theoretically, it's a public forum; in practice, not really. Only a handful of blogs are read outside the author's circle of friends - if at all. For all practical purposes, the nanny's blog was just about as private as her diary would have been in a previous century. And like a diary, it's of no concern to an employer.
Except, of course, that once she knew of it, not only could Olen not stop reading it, she recommended it to her friends.
And then, having been made uncomfortable about her employee's diary/blog, Olen then publicized it in the NY Times! If Olen was embarassed by finding details of her personal life in her nanny's blog, how could she have been so stupid as to give it a write it up in the Times?
How does someone this stupid get a gig at the Times?
It's pretty fascinating to see the blog-world and the non-blog-world collide in the pages of the New York Times. We'll probably see more and more of this, as to the outside world what happens in here just makes no sense. And inside here, we assume that those outside are paying no attention at all. But they are, a little. And 1% isn't 0%.
I have thought, as I watch every little thing that a public figure ever said dredged up, that there are things I have written in old fanzines that I hope to never see in the New York Times. (Well, I think I'm safe on that score, anyway.)
Back in the 70s, when I was publishing fanzines, I gave a copy of one to a non-sf friend. She read it and said she didn't like it, that it made her very uncomfortable, like she was snooping into other peoples' correspondence. That's when I first realized that something could be public and private at the same time.
My first thought: About to turn forty? She's just a kid.
My second thought: Must be effin' nice to have enough money to live in Brooklyn and hire a nanny.
My third thought: A journalist? Must be her hubby's money.
My fourth thought: Is her hubby older than she? Is she worried that he's going to have a mid-life crisis, take his money, dump her and the kids in favor of a sports-model wife, and leave her to try to make a living as a journalist?
My fifth thought: What were she and her husband arguing about, I wonder?
I imagine the argument going something like this:
"You're banging the babysitter!"
"Am not!"
"Are too! She's a little slut!"
I see this really differently than everyone else I've seen commenting, I think - Olen outed the nanny to all her friends, and judging from what she wrote, didn't tell her nanny.
I think Tessa was fired because she was giving Olen's friends an unflattering picture of life in the Olen house.
Just to reply to Sarah M's comment, when I was jobhunting, I always raised the subject of my blog during the second interview, to make sure there would be no problem and/or to set guidelines if the manager wanted. I thought it was far better to go into the business relationship openly than for my blog to become an unpleasant surprise.
"What were she and her husband arguing about, I wonder . . ."
If I understand the story correctly, it was actually Sylvia Plath arguing with her husband, but Ms. Olen, vain as Carly Simon's boyfriend, misunderstood . . .
I haven't had time to chase down all of the commentary (and I couldn't even finish Olen's piece), but a point that I think hasn't been stressed enough is the degree to which the Olens' reaction is tied up with a pathological aversion to the idea of the nanny as a sexual being.
What it reminds me of, obliquely, is Dan Savage's discussion in his book The Kid of the decision whether to circumcise his adopted son. Savage, of course, talks openly about the fact that someday his son (who is days old) is going to want to have his cock sucked and how circumcision will affect that. And of course he's right, and of course it's something should be thinking about while making the decision, but it's still shocking to see someone writing about the potential sex life of an infant.
Taking arguendo that Ms. Olen is a more accurate reporter of her own reactions and of her conversations with her husband than she is about the content of the blog, it's clear that the Olens had a similar shock reaction on being given a window into the fact that their nanny had a healthy sex life. Olen herself mentions this prominently without seeming to understand that her reactions are pathological, that in fact she hopes we will congratulate her for having them.
And that is the truly pathetic part of this entire business.
I thought that Olen's disgust and hyperbole over the nanny's sex life was particularly telling. I'm going to guess that her sex life is pretty wilted and unexciting.
I'm surprised Mr. Olen isn't coming in for more heat here. He didn't write the article, but he doesn't exactly come off as an innocent bystander here; long before Ms. Olen reaches the post about the fight, her husband is ready to fire the woman:
My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. "This is inappropriate," he said. "We don't need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot."
And it's hubby who does the actual firing. But of course, here and on other blogs, there are comments making the snide inferences that it was all the missus making this decision and probably it had something to do with her fear of a younger woman in the house. (Because, y'know, it's all about the girls and their pathetic catfights.)
I don't see anything that was 'really' going on here or any secret motivations. Olen's pretty plain about her motivations: she felt a little envious, she was shocked by some of the nanny's revelations, and she didn't want to be mentioned in somebody else's blog, even anonymously; she vicariously enjoyed her nanny's twentysomething adventures, to the point that she tells her friends about the blog and still reads it long after Mr. Olen exercised his prerogative to kick the slut out of his house--but only as long as she was a voyeur. When she and her husband became characters in the story, it stopped being a kind of porn for her.
It's pretty funny to hear a journalist bitch about somebody else betraying their confidences and using them as a character in a narrative, mind you.
The line that really killed me was
"When our nanny referred to our house on her blog as work in a seemingly sarcastic fashion, she broke the covenant." A covenant that the nanny never made, by the way.
This story reminded me of all the bosses and landlords I've had who made me call them by their first names. They were usually former hippies who felt guilty about the fact that they were making money off of me, so I had to pretend to be their friends to assuage their guilt.
I'd much rather have old-fashioned bosses, who have dealt with the fact that they are making money off of me and that they have to make certain concessions to make it work out in their favor. Like fixing the plumbing. These guilt-ridden hypocrites like to be as cheap and bossy as possible, and then make their employees cheer them up about it. Part of being a boss is feeling some resentment from the underlings from time to time. Suck it up, Olen.
It's like breaking up with someone, and then acting so guilty about it that they wind up comforting you for dumping them.
Rather than her (unfounded) fear that one person might judge her life and find it wanting, Helaine Olen is (or would, if she used Google) finding now that dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people really are judging her life and finding it wanting.
I believe that there are now more links to this story than to all the rest of Ms. Olen's published and web-available journalism combined.
Let's look at another aspect of the Times story:
Olen apparently has run through a string of nannies, and every one of them has, in her eyes, had problems related to sex. ("I hadn't exactly been a stranger to the sexual shenanigans of our previous baby sitters.") Coincidence? Bad luck?
Confucius met a man on the road, travelling from his home town to move to a new town. He asked Confucius, "Master, how do you find the people there?"Confucius asked him, "How did you find the people where you came from?"
The man replied, "They are all no good; they lie, cheat, steal, and are lazy."
Confucius replied, "I think you will find that the people in the new town are much the same".
A little later another man travelling in the same direction as the first for the same reasons stopped Confucius and asked the same question.
Again Confucius asked him how he found the people to be where he came from.
the man replied, "They are great, hard working, honest, loving people."
Confucius answered, "I think you will find them to be the same".
I think someone would have to be genuinely nuts to take a job as nanny for Helaine Olen now.
And to Helaine Olen, when she finds this (and she will -- Google and her pathology will ensure that) please get the help you need. If your shrink keeps a blog, don't read it.
Kevin J. Maroney: but a point that I think hasn't been stressed enough is the degree to which the Olens' reaction is tied up with a pathological aversion to the idea of the nanny as a sexual being
You definitely need to read the commentaries in the links if that interests you. This point has not been missed at all; it's prominant in many of the threads.
mythago: I'm surprised Mr. Olen isn't coming in for more heat here.
That surprised me, too. I've been to some very smart blogs that catch the class issues, the sexuality issues, the privacy issues, and so on, but frame this whole dynamic as something happening between women only. (Some point out that Ms. Olen may have been worried her husband was attracted to the nanny and fired her out of jealousy--despite the fact that Mr. Olen did the firing, for example.)
I was reading the comments to Dr. B's post when the nanny showed up this morning. That felt a little awkward.
The mother/nanny relationship is inherently weird. This woman spends 15 hours a week in my home. She reads my books and eats food from my fridge. Yes, I'm quite sure she's much more focused on my daughter than she is on me (or my husband), but the fact remains that she's naturally got much more access to personal and intimate information about me than I do about her.
Fortunately, I have experience with that kind of relationship from the other side. The therapist/client relationship is also both intimate and one-sided - I learn all about my client's deepest secrets and vulnerabilities, while revealing as little as possible about my own. What I've learned in that setting is that it DOES NOT WORK to try to even up the intimacy imbalance by upping the degree of personal exposure on the professional's side. There are some things my clients can only tell me because they know nothing personal about me, because I am in some sense anonymous.
I got explicit training in graduate school about the danger of "multiple relationships" - which is not in this case polyamory, but two people relating to each other in multiple roles, such as therapist-client and friend-friend. When one set of roles involve a power imbalance, multiple relationships generally lead to trouble. Unfortunately, no one gives that kind of training to nannies or people hiring nannies. Tessy didn't know that accepting Olen's overtures of friendship - and it seems very clear that Olen wanted to treat the nanny like a family friend - would be so disastrous, and I can't really blame her. She's learned an expensive lesson. I can blame Olen. As the person in the relationship with the greater amount of power, it was her responsibility to know better.
I like my nanny. I looked hard for a nanny I could feel comfortable with, and someone who would fit in well with the way we want our household to work. But I don't make the mistake of thinking that she's my friend. I pay her salary. I can fire her. No matter how buddy-buddy I want to be, she's never going to be able to forget those two things - so neither should I.
James D. MacDonald--you say exactly what was on my mind, yet so much better. A journalist who lives in Brooklyn and employs a nanny to take care of her kids while she, uh....writes an article for the NYT about her nanny? The nanny was, admittedly, unwise and irresponsible, in the way we all were when we were twentysomethings. But the author of this piece....I'm sorry, even granting her every possible excuse, I still see class anxieties--money, security, lifestyle choices--in her writing up the wazoo.
mythago:
I'm surprised Mr. Olen isn't coming in for more heat here.
I almost quoted Mr. Olen's line in my discussion of their sexual panic, but decided that res ipsa loquitur.
(My Latin is rusty enough that I can't even begin to remember what the perfect tense of "loquitur" would be....)
This delusion that employees are actually pals is interesting to me.
It reminds me of the phenomenon of guys I'd heard about in Japan who'd gone to Thailand and fallen in love with hookers. The romance was always shattered thousands of dollars later when they'd hired private investigators to follow the hookers and learned that the hookers still kept their old clients, despite the professions of true love. The human capacity for self-delusion is astounding.
As to why it was Mr. Olen who fired the nanny: How else could he prove to his wife that he wasn't boffing the hired help?
As to why Mrs. Olen kept reading the blog: She was both hoping and afraid to find "Last night while the missus was out I did the dirty with her hubby," or words to that effect.
All IMHO, of course.
(Or was it, when Ms. Olen found out that the nanny could find women hot, she had a glimmer of hope in her heart -- but when the nanny entered into a monogamous relationship with a male that her hopes were crushed? Was she jealous of the boyfriend?)
A lot of folks seem to assume that Mr. Olen was manipulated because Ms. Olen seems, by her own account, to be manipulative.
All IMHO, of course.
Of course. Two women, one young and sexually adventurous, one middle-aged; it clearly must be a personal struggle over the man in the household, the man himself being at best a mere pawn in the situation.
It's pretty clear from the article that Mr. Olen wanted to get rid of the nanny as soon as he read the blog, because he didn't like what he saw (even though it had nothing to do with him). There's not a hint that Mr. Olen was reluctant to fire the nanny or that Mrs. Olen "manipulated" him into doing so.
But hey, it's all good sexist-meme fun. Don't mind me.
Sean wrote: "This delusion that employees are actually pals is interesting to me."
I see that a lot used to justify sub-standard working conditions, below-minimum wages, etc. "Oh, we're family here, you don't need a union!"
Not to defend Ms. Olen, but I see a couple of extra factors at work in her behavior: 1. The fact that this is someone who's taking care of her children probably makes her extra touchy regarding sex issues: she might be a bit more reasonable about the sexuality of, say, a housekeeper. (Or not.) 2. Likely she feels guilty about not having the time to take care of her kids herself, and likely the guilt is unacknowledged, so she takes it out on the nannies. 3. She may just be really uncomfortable with having some complete stranger suddenly become an intimate part of the household-- I know that would bother me-- so she tried to defuse that feeling by creating a "friendship" relationship. Not a good idea in the long run, and again, probably largely unconscious.
I imagine Olen will find it somewhat more difficult to get her next nanny.
Tiel: The fact that this is someone who's taking care of her children probably makes her extra touchy regarding sex issues
Mothers and fathers 1) have sex and 2) take care of their children, and the majority keep the two from overlapping (well, any more than they must, considering how you get kids to take care of in the first place). The fact is, just about anybody who takes care of kids also has a sex life. We just pretend they don't.
It's pretty clear from the article that Mr. Olen wanted to get rid of the nanny as soon as he read the blog, because he didn't like what he saw (even though it had nothing to do with him).
This assumes that Ms. Olen is telling the truth about Mr. Olen. I don't find that she necessarily is. Arguing against the assumption that Mr. Olen fired the babysitter on his own are the problems that Ms. Olen had with all her previous babysitters, none of whom (so far as we know) kept blogs. All of them were reportedly sexually troubled, and all of them were let go.
Recall that Mr. Olen didn't write the article. If he had a lick of sense and any control he'd have kept it from being written, or, if written, published.
Mr. Olen is curiously absent from the story. All we really know is that a) he and Ms. Olen argued (we know this because we have third-party confirmation), and b) he was the one who actually did the firing (and again, we know this because we have third-party confirmation).
So far the only points Ms. Olen has been getting from anyone has been for her honesty. I don't think she deserves them.
Recall that it wasn't enough for her to fire the nanny. She had to go out of her way to destroy her as well. That suggests it wasn't the blog that did it.
I agree with Mythago that Ms. Olen's husband clearly had an active role in this affair, and that parsing it all merely as a fight between two women is probably a mistake.
I agree with Jim Macdonald that it's reasonable to regard Ms. Olen as manipulative, given that she tells us just about everything we need to know in order to come to that conclusion.
Jim's prior post slipped in while I was typing mine. Interesting points about what we do and don't know; I'll have to think about that.
"just about anybody who takes care of kids also has a sex life. We just pretend they don't."
Now, that accounts for the slash about Mary Poppins and Bert...
[Kevin Maroney wonders about perfect tense
of "res ipsa loquitur"]
res ipsa locuta est, if I'm not mistaken.
"Loquor" is a deponent verb, passive in form but
active in meaning, so its perfect tense is like other
perfect passives, the past participle plus "to be".
Dave MB
I had been avoiding the Olin piece because I knew it would be stupid. At your instigation, Patrick, I read it. It was much stupider than I could have imagined. I didn't so much want to say to the nanny that she shouldn't have told her employer about her blog, as offer her a job. (She's already got one. Too bad.)
One thing to bear in mind is that nannies get fired for all kinds of stupid reasons and that Olin is not unusual in this. But for Olin to publically proclaim herself as the woman who fired a highly intelligent, literate, talented, friendly nanny because she had a blog is much stupider for one's longterm prospects of getting high quality help than anything one mighht dig up from the nanny's blog. (Note to moms needing childcare: if you do fire a nanny for her blog, keep it to yourself!)
Note to those looking for childcare situations: I Google your name and email address and check whether you have a blog and then I read it before I interview. (It bears mentioning that some people don't seem to realize what is comminicated by their email address. Would you offer a childcare job to a cruella, vampirella, or carmilla@hotmail.com?) This is the 21st century, after all. But having a blog as such does not bias me one way or the other.
The reason I left the husband out of my thinking was that, as he wanted to fire the nanny earlier on for basically the same reason she decided to fire her later, so the two of them seem to have the same basic feeling in essentials, but then there's this
days when my husband and I would spend hours tearing into each other over who should clean the tub after a child mistook it for the potty
JMO
"just about anybody who takes care of kids also has a sex life. We just pretend they don't."
True. I'm not claiming Ms. Olen's reaction was at all logical or reasonable-- just pointing out some of the additional emotional fuel on her fire.
Kathryn brought up another point I had been thinking about-- everyone's been agreeing it was foolish for the nanny to tell her employer about her blog. But it's entirely possible Ms. Olen might have eventually discovered the blog on her own (though she is probably not as net-savvy as you, K.) Doesn't that cast a different light on the alleged foolishness?
A good question, Tiel, but in this case I believe there's an answer: The nanny's blog contained nothing specific enough to search out with Google. Neither the nanny's name nor those of Ms. Olen and her family appeared in it, at least until Ms. Olen published her piece in the Times.
By contrast, Ms. Olen's Times piece contained direct quotes from the nanny's blog which enabled thousands of people to find it immediately. Which is what I was thinking of when I observed (actually, this was first noticed by Teresa) that the nanny was actually much more careful about everyone's privacy than Ms. Olen was.
(For all that, Tiel makes a good point: if you're going to keep a blog anyway, there's an argument to be made that telling your employer is the more prudent thing to do. I'm not saying this is always the case, but I can imagine many circumstances where it would be the case.)
How would Ms. Olen have found the blog without being told of it? What search terms would she have used?
It doesn't seem the blog used any real names, while a quick Google on Brooklyn + nanny yields over 100,000 hits.
"You despise me, don't you, Rick?"
"I would if I gave you a second thought."
Was Ms. Olen's problem that the nanny wasn't giving her a second thought?
I note that I've trodden upon Olen's treasured vanity by misspelling her name.
Regarding potential nanny blogs: I've read much worse stuff on the blogs of potential nannies than anything Tessa posted. And I don't mean details about sex lives. But rather stuff that makes is perfectly clear why the potential nanny wants a low-paid job that comes with a free place to live. That is one of the questions you need to answer when you consider someone applying for a nanny-type job. Having a blog can be a plus, because it provides a portrait not otherwise available to the potential employer. (I hope you knew that already.) When talking to potential childcare people, I am always careful to mention that I have a blog and give the URL. (For blogging moms, the shoe really is on the other foot!) There may be some who decided not to interview because of stuff in my blog. (I know of no such instances.) But I figure, if they're not comfortable with my online presence, they're not going to feel comfortable with the real me, either.
John said: "I imagine Olen will find it somewhat more difficult to get her next nanny."
I doubt it - there are enough people who need the work. It does seem likely that Olen will get the nanny she deserves: that is, one able to convincingly lie, deceive and pretend. This is probably not quite what Ms Olen had in mind..
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad"
but in wealthy NY, you can hire a nanny to do it instead.
In answer to Jim's question, here's the method: start with an email address (and an IP # if you have it). Google them. Someone who has a blog probably makes comments on other people's blogs or other places online. What you are looking for is a place which connects the email address, to an online handle of any kind, or a URL. If you only get the online handle, Google it and it can lead you to the blog. Most of the time, it works.
Which is what I was thinking of when I observed (actually, this was first noticed by Teresa) that the nanny was actually much more careful about everyone's privacy than Ms. Olen was.
And the nanny didn't get paid for writing about the whole mess in her blog, either -- but I don't think "a journalist living in Brooklyn" gave away her tale of woe to the New York Times for free.
Douglas: It depands on how much Olen can pay. If she pays $40,000/yr, she can get another nanny, no problem. If she can't afford that, well then she may never get anyone like Tessa again.
OK, I said it was "possible" Olen might have found the blog, not "probable"... I hadn't realized that there was so little identifying detail on it.
But it's also possible Tessy might have felt she should tell her employer(s-- I agree Mr. Olen is strangely absent from this whole scenario) that she was writing about them. Ie. as she became closer to the family, she may have felt bad about talking about them behind their backs, and decided honesty was the best policy.
Katherine, if you want, try to find my LiveJournal. (The one that isn't Mist and Snow.)
When I was a kid I found a short story in a collection, about an Englishwoman working as a governess for a Russian family, circa 1880. Every person in the family--large extended Russian upper class family--kept a diary, and would leave it out in the expectation that it would be read by everyone else. When a disagreement or misunderstanding took place, the first question was usually, "But didn't you read my diary? Because I explicitly said--" The young Englishwoman, of course, is boggled not only by the use of diaries as a method of sideways communication, but by the fact that she is supposed to participate, reading other people's diaries and writing one and leaving it out herself. I don't remember the title or the author, but the story was the first thing I thought of, reading this article.
I will say: it was hard for me to employ a sitter for my kids when I was working in New York, not because there weren't people out there who wanted to work (and with a few exceptions we had great sitters...all, curiously, women named Lisa) but because I found the employee/employer line a tough one to manage. I am not comfortable treating someone like a chambermaid of yore; if I have someone working in my house, spending time with my kids when I can't be there, I want it to be someone with whom I am at least comfortable sharing a cup of coffee. And yet, I'm the employer and I need to be able to hold that line. I suspect some of Olen's stupidity may be rooted in her inability to manage that balance between friend and friendly that makes the relationship work.
I also have to note (and yes, I know at this point it's not about whether Tessa should have told her employer about the blog) that if what Olen says on this one point is correct, Tessa not only mentioned the blog, but mentioned it several times, which sounds at very least like living dangerously. And while Olen might have found the blog on her own, I'm not sure she would have realized it was her nanny writing about her household. In fact, given her apparent self-regard, I wonder if, had she found the blog on her own, Olen would have recognized herself, or simply felt sorry for some other woman (or maybe even enjoyed the blog on her own and felt no connection to it at all).
LJ requires whole different tactics. For that I'd trace you through who you're friends are. With all due respect, you know a f#*@ of a lot more about security issues than your average nanny.
Here's an entertaining case in point. Not a nanny, but someone actually trying to conceal her identity when creating an attack page:
She posts an email address. Also, if you shave the directory name off that IP, you get a site created by the same person for the Canadian Freepers. The domain space seems to have been donated by a Republican-aligned ISP out of Texas (note the absence of domain name; only IP# is used for the site; I take that tto mean the space is donated, not sold).
I don't want to walk you through all the entertaining details, but here is the author of the attack page in a naked embrace with her (ex-?)husband.
I'm very interested in the context in which the nanny offered information about the blog. Olen's noting that they were tending a toddler and the nanny "Murmured... 'I've started a blog. I'll give you the link,'" rings false to me (and not least because it'd be terrible dialogue. No one talks like that. It would be phrased completely differently). Did the nanny bring it up out of the blue, or was Olen prying, as the nanny had, I'm paraphrasing, revealed little about her personal life up to that point.
OK, I'm neither a parent nor a childcare worker, and perhaps for that reason, I'm having trouble figuring out why it's bad for a nanny to be a sexual being.
Help me out here. Is it for any of these reasons?
So is the ideal childcare worker celibate, or someone who would never ever talk about sex with anyone?
Also it occurs to me, speaking of class issues, that the lower classes are always considered to be more sexualized. If you find out your nanny is a sex fiend, it might only confirm your prejudices.
Mary Poppins slash? Truly, nothing is sacred...
Laura: I'm not claiming it makes sense or there's any logical reason behind it. I'm saying it's an emotional reaction that many people have and that doesn't necessarily yield to rational argument. Especially when yoked in tandem with all the other issues that seem to be going on in this situation.
Your point about class and sex is well taken.
Someone with a degree in English, who's going to grad school for an advanced degree -- is a member of Olen's social class already.
Also possibly worth mentioning:
At the moment she was hired Tessy didn't have a blog.
--------------
Just guessing now, but Tessy may have named herself for Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
Going farther than that (going that far already) is very close to subtext-hunting.
--------------
I have a couple of aphorisms: People who know me will have heard them before:
1. There are no secrets.
2. Don't say anything to anyone anywhere that you don't want to hear Dan Rather read on the Six O'Clock News.
Laura:
It's actually even simpler than that: your subordinates and servants are not supposed to have more fun than you do. And if they do, they certainly shouldn't let their betters know about it.
Like John Scalzi, I also found myself wondering how far the earnings from this article will go to cover the higher wages her next nanny will undoubtedly demand.
The whole thing is a sorry wad of classism, sexism, and confused power dynamics.
JDM:
I was posting and did not see your comment. While Tessy may have been a member of Olen's intellectual class, the existence of the employee/employer relationship precludes their being members of the same economic class.
And in this country at this point in time, if you are in a lower economic class you are in a lower social class.
I've never tried it, but I suspect it's even easier to discover the blog of someone living in your house. The back button or the History screen on your computer browser might do it. (But indeed, my understanding is that Tess did not start out with a blog.)
"Someone with a degree in English, who's going to grad school for an advanced degree -- is a member of Olen's social class already."
Depends on your perception of class. Actually it depends on Olen's perception of class.
Olen might have felt Tessy was of a lower class because (a) she wasn't wealthy (b) she didn't own a NY home (c) she was looking for a nanny job (d) other imponderables having to do with family background, not having gone to the Right College, etc. The point is that it's fairly clear Olen felt superior.
The employer/employee relationship is the primary one, in this case. But Tess gives off better class signals than her employer, seems to me.
Laura: presumably, if you hire a sitter you hire someone who has good sense and is trustworthy, and that takes care of the first five points. As for the sixth point, feh.
I didn't particularly care about what my sitters did in their time outside of my household, and I certainly didn't think that what they were doing elsewhere was going to hurt my kids. On the other hand, I didn't really want details on what they were doing, either. Of course, I really don't want the details on the sex life of most of the people I know.
In fact, "don't say anything to anyone anywhere that you don't want to hear Dan Rather read on the Six O'Clock News" is terrible advice, as Jim Macdonald ought to realize after just a little thought.
What it says is that humans must never take one another into their trust. I think I can guess what Thomas Aquinas would have said to that.
But unless someday somebody trust somebody
There'll be nothing left of Earth, excepting fishes.
--Richard Rogers
What "Don't say anything to anyone that you don't want to hear Dan Rather read" boils down to a) Tell the truth, b) Don't do anything shameful, and c) No one is required to tell everything they know.
Or: Only tell your own secrets. If a friend told me something in confidence, that's his secret. He can tell others. I can't.
If I were giving orders for a raid, I wouldn't want to hear Dan Rather read them that night. But I hope I would give orders that, when they came out later (as they will), wouldn't reveal me to be a fool, a poltroon, or an incompetent.
I will admit that I've fallen short of these ideals.
Patrick: Even though Jim's wrong, if more indiscrete people acted as though he were right, the Internet might be a better (or at least nicer!) place.
(One does occasionally meet people who talk as though they expect to be widely quoted in everything they say; their conversational protocols are pretty weird.)
PNH:
"In fact, 'don't say anything to anyone anywhere that you don't want to hear Dan Rather read on the Six O'Clock News' is terrible advice, as Jim Macdonald ought to realize after just a little thought."
However, amend to "don't write anything online that you don't want to hear Dan Rather read on the Six O'Clock News," and it works quite nicely (excepting that Dan Rather is no longer doing the six o'clock news, and where I live, I think the national news is on at 6:30).
This is part and parcel with the Law of Internet Communication, which states: "Anything bad you ever write about someone online will get back to them sooner or later."
I'm very interested in the context in which the nanny offered information about the blog. Olen's noting that they were tending a toddler and the nanny "Murmured... 'I've started a blog. I'll give you the link,'" rings false to me (and not least because it'd be terrible dialogue. No one talks like that. It would be phrased completely differently).
When I bring up the subject of my blog, it's usually in the context of a conversation where somebody expressed an interest in something I've previously written up, I'll point people to the blog.
Sometimes it's a way of shortcircuiting conversation when I don't feel like repeating myself. Sometimes it's a way of pointing people to details I can't recall off the top of my head. Sometimes I hope to give the other party a bit more background so we can continue the conversation (see again the not repeating myself).
Purely speculative, but I wonder if that might not be what happened here. 'How did you enjoy the poetry reading?' 'I've got a blog, you can read it there.' Particularly if the nanny was busy tending to a toddler at the time and not wanting the conversational distraction.
...And I wouldn't rely too heavily on a word-for-word recollection of a conversation that took place some considerable time in the past, and whose consequences were emotionally charged. Even the most unimpeachable witness (which people don't seem to consider Ms Olen) might be considered unreliable under such circumstances.
"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" is something that King Henry shouldn't have said.
James: why not? It worked, didn't it? :) And he took some political heat for the murder, but not near enough to bring him down.
"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Saddam who tried to snuff my Dad?"
The issue of privacy being dead, for better or worse, was taken one way by my Historically-sophisticated unreconstructed Mondale Democrat friend Dave Brin in The Transparent Society.
There's also the issue of defamation laws and copyright laws, which affect what one can say in public, differing from country to country. I cannot fault James D. Macdonald for keeping the online SFWA chats secure when I was being badly damaged in them by supporters of the plagiarists that cost me my aerospace career, and a quarter of a megabuck or so in legal fees. James D. Macdonald did the professionally correct thing, and the fault is at the feet of my (former) attorney, who was clueless about computers in general, the internet in particular, and the tactics of subpoena power.
I also agree with Patrick here on the essential nature of Trust in fellow human beings. The two extreme strategies are (1) paranoia: trust NOBODY, keep your systems secure, but at the cost of having few friends; (2) trust EVERYBODY until they violate that trust, which will give you less security, but many more friends, some of whom are statistically likely to stab you in the back.
Where one lives between those two extremes has been somewhat shifted by blogging but, I think, not very much.
What's It All About, Alfie, Dept.:
Spotted on GoogleNews (several stories) just after my previous post:
"Actress Sienna Miller has arrived at a West End theatre looking 'grim faced' following revelations about her fiancee Jude Law, in the Sunday papers. Jude publicly apologised to her for cheating on her with his children's nanny...."
No blogging involved? Quaint.
"... The twice Oscar-nominated actor said he was 'deeply ashamed and upset' at his behavior after Monday's newspaper revelations, according to The Press Association. Law met and fell for 24-year-old Miller while filming last year's remake of 1960s classic 'Alfie.'"
"The affair began when Law was still married to Frost, the mother of his three children. The couple finally split in 2003 after being granted a "quickie" divorce in October on the grounds of the movie star's 'unreasonable behavior' after six years of marriage...."
There’s an entire novel of manners lurking under the surface of this.
The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki comes close.
Well, that sure opened up a big can'o'worms in American WASP culture:
Since the cultural ideal is "the classless society", the fact of nannies and maids makes WASPs uncomfortable -- how can it be a classless society if one has household servants -- illegal aliens, even -- working for wealthy Republicans and wealthy Democrats alike?
And to make things worse, the servants DARE to create a voice of their own, in one of those Bolshevik "blogs." What insolence! What treason against their betters!
All Americans are equal, but some Americans are more equal than others... (*SARCASM*)
I follow a modified version of Jim's advice, which is that I don't put anything in writing that I wouldn't want publicized. I tell people private things, and I keep a personal journal, but I make sure that written correspondence doesn't contain anything that I ought not be saying.
Try acting as though wealth is irrelevant to social standing and see where that gets you sometime.
Social standing is important, down at a primal primate hardwired level -- we're a plains ape immensely specialized to gang up on problems, and if your band status is low, your problems aren't the ones being ganged up on.
It's tricky to get around the insistence on mediating social standing in a way that benefits the individual choosing the mediation mechanism, too.
Entirely predictably, we're drifting en masse into the "shame on her for being so stupid as to tell the employer" and the "that's what she gets for having a blog" storylines. It's like it's a brain virus or something. I like Atrios's remarks, posted this afternoon:
When someone experiences a negative consequence of something they posted on the internets I don't really understand why many people feel the need to preface every comment on that situation with "people should KNOW they can get in trouble for what they post on the inernet." Well, duhh. We mostly know this though sometimes people are more unaware of than others. It's useful to occasionally remind people that they should think twice before doing something on the internet that can be easily linked to their real life. But, still, sometimes some of us don't follow that advice or make the "mistake" of actually telling someone we know about our blog or our politics or our religion or anything else. And, when that happens, people are sure to point out that it's stupid to tell your bosses anything about your personal life because OF COURSE that will only get you in trouble, etc.
Look, the fact that something opens you up to asshole treatment by assholes doesn't excuse the asshole behavior anymore than having a few drinks at a meat market bar late at night excuses the behavior of a rapist. A victim is a victim, no matter how "stupid" we might imagine their "risky" behavior was. I'm glad none of us except actual victims ever do anything stupid.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that in l'affaire Olen, the actions of the nanny in question are essentially irrelevant, except to the extent that it allows you to pat yourself on the back for not have ever been so stupid yourself. Whatever.
[...] The issue here is that the former employer decided to turn this incident into a piece for the New York Times, and that the Times thought it worthy of being published. It's that the Times allowed a woman who was upset that her nanny would dare to have a life and dare to very rarely reference her employment to call the nanny a drunken slut for a national audience. [...] It's that it's somehow acceptable for an employer to talk shit about an employee in a national newspaper but not okay for an employee to briefly mention her personal employment on her weblog. The Times' decision to publish this story legitimized the view that not only was she within her rights to fire her (surely true) but that she had the additional privilege of talking trash about her in a respectable national newspaper.That's what's interesting about this story: the values implicit in Olen's decision to write this essay and the Times' decision to publish it. It's increasingly clear that the people who control our national media are as unreflective an elite as the Bourbon royal court. Helaine Olen doesn't just enjoy massive privileges; she enjoys the privilege of never, ever having to think about her privileges.
How many of you have blogs and jobs? Having a nanny job isn't that different than having any other kind of job, except that a nanny's employers may feel they have en loco parentis responsibilities. Assuming your employer will never know what you write on the Internet borders on delusional. So, what is to be done?
Please don't think that I think Tessy did anything wrong.
I expect the consequences of stupidity will fall on Ms. Olen.
(To be clear: since Tess told her employers about the blog, she did not assume that her employers would never read it. Many others do.)
Patrick gave a very clear analysis, supra. That the "people who control our national media are as unreflective an elite as the Bourbon royal court" involves several levels of irony, in that, to pick just a few, they do pretend that there is no Class System, they delude themselves into thinking that they are reflective, they try to fool us into thinking that they can fairly report on the equally unreflective political leadership.
"Let the nannies eat cake" is perilously close to an immediately prevolutionary sentiment.
I think the class issue here is precisely that the nanny is a (nascent) member of her employer's class. If she were clearly and obviously a member of the lower class, their relationship would be well-defined; but since she's a potential peer of her employer, the employer is torn between treating her as a domestic servant and as a friend, and ends up botching the job entirely.
(Random unrelated question: Just how much money do you have to make before a nanny starts being in the realm of possibilities? I'm not exactly poor, but I don't know anyone who has a nanny, and can't imagine affording one myself. They always sound like a luxury of the European nobility, not people with jobs.)
Patrick: I don't want to let myself drift along with that masse, because that was never my intention. While I do wonder about the context in which Tessy first mentioned her blog, I only do so because I believe that the origin of the story is as manipulated by Olen as all the rest. Follow me--- Olen was not happy not knowing more about her nanny's personal life, and so sought further information from the nanny herself, under the pretext of a 'more friendly' professional relationship. Olen seemed to want to be buddies with her nanny, rather than her employer.
The whole thing, start to finish, demonstrates Olen's manipulations and, exponentially thereby, the manipulations of the media in general. The New York Times has built a solid reputation as an outstanding news source on a basis that includes plagiarism and out-and-out fabrication. That the current administration is still in power after more than 5 years is evidence enough that the mainstream media does not accomplish what it sets out to do: i.e., inform the public. While Bush is qualifying his previous admonitions so that Karl Rove might keep his job, everyone is reading about the sex life of a Brooklyn journalist's nanny.
Of course, no, you can't inform a public that doesn't want to be.
This travel piece gives you a sense of Olen's usual voice. Part of Olen's problem is that she wrote about firing her nanny in much the same tone she uses for writing about how the very rich would evaluate a hotel experience:
Nonetheless, this battle of the hip hostelries will insure the discriminating celebrity or wannabe a wider variety of accommodations. The Mondrian, quite simply, promises to be a sybarite's delight; or, as Mr. Schrager observed, the hotel equivalent of what Alice saw when she passed through the looking glass.
How many of you have blogs and jobs? .. Assuming your employer will never know what you write on the Internet borders on delusional. So, what is to be done?
Kathryn, I blog openly under my real name and have held two jobs (and conducted two jobhunts) while blogging.
I've also told my employers about my blog before hiring so it won't come as a surprise. Hasn't been entirely flawless, but on the whole seems to work reasonably well.
Since Patrick's twice complained about topic drift, this probably isn't the place to discuss these issues, but if you've got any more specific questions, send 'em to me, and I'll see if I can enlighten.
Those curious about the context in which Tessy mentioned her blog to her employer should head back over to BitchPhD's blog's comments. She explains it there. (Around comment 100 something, near the end.)
If I may clarify, I generally try not to be a martinet about "topic drift", as a general principle. To quote the late F. M. Busby, "Digressions are how anything gets said."
Huh. I thought one of the creepier things was Mr Olen's desire to fire the nanny when he thought what he was reading was inappropriate instead of just stopping reading the damn blog. (What he really meant was that what he read there made him feel things he found uncomfortable.)
About that whole we don't want people who look after children to have a sex life thing. You know, if one was female one used to only be able to be a teacher if one were single. Marriage immediately retired you and don't even THINK about any other sort of relationship. Because sex, you see, is evil and immoral and dirty and nasty and makes you unfit to be in charge of children. Unless they're your own of course. I suddenly wonder if this is solely an American meme...
MKK
"we're drifting en masse into the "shame on her for being so stupid as to tell the employer""
I guess the point I was trying to make was that I _don't_ think it was necessarily stupid. There are a couple of good arguments in favor of doing what she did.
Why did Tessy tell her employer that she was keeping a blog - and even gave her the address -, though?
Not crying shame on her for doing that, however. Just wondering about why someone would want to do that. Was it a well-meaning gesture, a token of friendship, and attempt to become a part of the family...?
Olen's behaviour is inexcusable. But I must confess that I fail to see why Tessy went and did that.
Kathryn Cramer: To be clear: since Tess told her employers about the blog, she did not assume that her employers would never read it. Many others do.
Furthermore, the employers read it regularly for months and never said anything about it to Tessy (even when they fired her). Ms Olen gave the blog's address out to friends, even. Did Tessy have a reason to think they had any objections to the contents of the blog until she found out about Ms. Olen's piece?
My emotional response to all this -- having previously discussed it with purportedly objectivity -- is fury. I know exactly what it feels like to be fired with no proper cause, without having received any warning that I've done anything wrong, and, afterwards, not only do others confirm that I've done nothing wrong, but the monster who fired me spins my misery and their cluelessness so as to profitably advance the monster's greater evil agenda.
I've mentioned the USA self-delusion that we have no Class System. One part of this which friends of mine in other continents usually add as corollary, is that American intellectuals are a group which should be naturally in solidarity with the working class, but are almost effortlessly co-opted by the ownership class.
In much of the world, one can say this even while being anti-Marxist, even though it depends historically on Marxist analysis. In the USA today, outside the university campus, the last refuge of Marxist reductionism of purely economic arguments to justify political acts is -- it seems to me -- those far Right Republicans who do not adhere to a specifically Christian fundamentalist belief, yet use the Christian Right to add to their ranks in the polls.
Topic drift, somewhat, but I do miss "Buzz" Busby, and think that he was right. But I digress.
I believe it possible that Ms. Olen had judged her own life, found it wanting, and projected her feelings onto the closest available person who approximated herself.
MKK:
I suspect the assumption wasn't that conjugal activities unfitted a woman to teach, but that teaching would distract her from her wifely duties and impending brood of children.
On the other hand, in support of your theory, I think Oxbridge dons used to have to be unmarried. At least that (if I'm remembering correctly) wasn't a double standard.
Okay, I confess: I wrote this comment for the sake of getting to use "unfit" as a verb.
And we appreciate you for it, S.
It's a horrible lesson to learn how misplaced ones trust can be. I suspect Tess has learned to be cautious even with people whom she initially trusts.
Thus I suppose it is less likely that Tess will one day find her Internet-posted fiction or snarky blog comments in the folder her spouse has been building up for the divorce lawyer, to show why she is an unfit parent.
Happened to me. With a lot of legal work I was still able to work out joint custody, despite this, and 7 years on, I have a great relationship with my daughter - but I stopped doing creative writing around that point. The wellsprings just shut off completely.
It also happened to an Australian Goth type I know (a fairly talented amateur SFnal and splatterpunk writer). He lost all custody and contact with his kid. In the Family Court hearing, he was shown a piece of dark fantasy that he'd written and posted on a BBS only a couple days before, and when he acknowledged he had written it, that was that. (Yes, I am taking his word for this, and no it wasn't sexual.)
Back to Tess - is it a good thing to have learned not to trust? I don't think so. I'm not sure whether it is more damaging when someone learns "don't trust" or "don't create". I think whenever someone learns either of these, we collectively suffer. We may not realize it because we will never see what we lost.
Jim MacDonald - It seems to me that while your advice may be eminently practical, for many people it boils down to the two choices above: "Don't trust" or "Don't create". The third option: "Create only totally sunny, always sweet, never unconventional or sexual content" doesn't work in many cases because, well, some people just aren't like that. Tess didn't write anything terribly outrageous, from what I can gather, but no matter what you write or how sweet and innocuous your writing, it will never be pure enough for somebody out there.
If you aren't 100% a fluffy bunnies person, your choices are: "write stuff that's not what your heart wants to write" or "don't write, period", or "don't ever show anyone what you write." I can't fault you for realism, but I think we lose when potentially creative people are forced to censor themselves in the name of realism.
I know, a little, a man who might take "never say anything to anyone that you don't want on the news" to heart. He once said something magnificently indiscreet that was quoted widely everywhere. Now tired of the way that people kept reminding him of this one error, he turned wearily to one questioner and explained, "The quotation in question happened in private with only one other person present. Think on that."
I am not sure how I would be changed if a comment I made in private suddenly became headline news.
I am amused to report that "Helaine Olen" tops "London Bombing" as a search on Technorati:
Search 13.5 million blogs for the latest on: Top Searches This Hour1. “Karl Rove”
2. “Harry Potter”
3. “Helaine Olen”
4. “London Bombing”
S. Dawson: I don't recall anything about Oxbridge dons being requisite bachelors... hrm. Randomly looking up biographies of c19th dons only gives me one which mentions marriage, and that in a note that he never married... interesting. But possibly it was more the case in earlier, more clerically-dominated, years? Yet Another Thing to research when I have time, I guess.
(Gah! Must stop reading blogs. Keep filling notebooks with interesting footnotes.)
Wild guess: Perhaps there was a social aspect? There have been historically some pretty odd social standards about who should and shouldn't marry, and a society as artificial as Oxbridge academia would seem a good place to breed them. I mean, if it was a Cardinal Career Mistake for a junior fellow to marry, for whatever reason (and I'm sure we could invent some), then by the time they'd jumped up a couple of rungs you might well find you'd encouraged a culture of middle-aged bachelors, and one wouldn't want to break with Tradition...
So . . .
How many Reality TV Shows / Episodes of LAW & ORDER (or CSI) / bad movies / good movies / novels will this incident spawn?
Mike - it's not clear to me what the cutoff is. I have a friend who hasn't managed to pay his electric bill in six months, whose finances are shot, and who in the best of times barely makes enough to get by, who has a nanny - because his stepfather has a boat docked in a small Carribbean country and knew a teenage girl who wanted to travel to Canada and learn English.
Such stories aren't as rare as it seems like they ought to be.
Are people considering that there's a trust issue from Olen's point of view too? I'm not defending her behavior, it's atrocious
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