Super busy lately but wanted to give you a lil something. Please enjoy this repost from last year.
So I work in childcare...not your typical childcare, not a daycare, more like drop off care on an as needed basis. We service mostly high end customers and the majority of them are so hard to please to begin with. I have to share an incident that happened to me yesterday. I had about 10 kids varying in ages from 12mths to 7 years old. It was a normal chaotic day with the normal amount of chaos and I've been doing this for 9 years so yesterday was no big deal.
One of the little girls we had did not listen, would take things from others, hit littler ones etc. This particular girl was two so all this behavior was pretty much to be expected. When her mother returned to pick her up she asked me how her daughter's behavior was and I first responded "it was okay".
She prodded me for more details not fully accepting the "it was okay" answer.
So she asked again "no, really was she okay?"
Not wanting to lie to her I said "Well, she was a little mean, but it was no big deal".
The mother looked at me as if I had just called her daughter a retarded lunatic and said "MEAN?". "What exactly did she do that constitutes her being called mean?"
At first I thought she was just curious maybe even sharing a bit of sarcastic humor. With one look in her eyes I could tell she was not happy, in fact she looked horrified. I explained to her that her daughter had taken toys from other kids and even at times hit smaller kids but it was not a big deal. It was typical to see this behavior at this age.
She hollered at me "If it was no big deal then why did you just call her MEAN!"
I stood there shocked wondering how to respond to her.
Before I could even respond she said " Well, since she is sooo mean maybe we will never come back..there are other places that we could give our business to...I can't believe you just called her MEAN! What an ugly word to use to describe someones child!" Then she went into a tyrade about "if she was so MEAN you could have called me, or put her in timeout, but to refer to her as MEAN is insulting!"
I in shock at her reaction struggled to find the right thing to say to diffuse the situation. I said to her " I'm sorry,it was not that big of deal which is why we did not call or utilize timeout and I would not have even said anything had you not asked."
"Well again calling my daughter MEAN is so inapproaite you could have said she had issues or her behavior was less than savory.
SERIOUSLY!!! WTF!! If I had said to her that her daugther "had issues" then I can imagine that she would have seriously hit the roof! She just kept going on and on about me calling her daughter mean and insisting she would never come back again. In the course of her tantrum I apologized again.
At this point my manager came up and she said to my manager "well your employee here thinks my daughter is MEAN!" The manager, who thought she was joking too just smiled at the lady. So I turned to the manager and said "she says she is not coming back". My point in saying that was to inform the manager that the lady was really upset so that maybe she could diffuse the pyscho mom. But she didn't catch on quick enough to do so.
The mother then said "well give me my MEAN daughter, her MEAN diaper bag and her MEAN boots!" She was seroiuously furoius. I at this point just walked off realizing I was not gonna be able to fix this.
Anyways she wrote a letter to the owner and went on and on about how rude I was...she's getting $36 dollars credit even though yesterday she only spent $15. And I am defeated yet again! So I ask you, especially moms... did I do something wrong?
Update- I was promoted to manager at that job 1 month later. But not long after I left that company to work where I am now.
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