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Fran's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 9/11/00 -------------------- 6/14/00 6/6/00 5/16/00 5/1/00 4/25/00 4/7/00 3/28/00 3/21/00 -------------------- Fran's Introduction

June 14, 2000

A few days after I sent my entry in last week telling you about Jessie quitting her job at Wal-Mart, I got a message from them saying that they needed to discuss her termination with me! They wouldn't talk to my husband since he was the "stepfather," which I can't figure out. We tried to guess what she could have done to get fired (and why she had to lie to me about it). She has admitted to drinking some beer, so maybe she went to work with alcohol on her breath? Or maybe she got caught in a back room necking with a guy? Or maybe she was rude to a customer? We couldn't think of anything else. So I called. The manager was very nice and apologized for not calling earlier since he'd been on vacation. He told me that he had a 16-year-old son and if he were fired he would want to know about it and the reason why. I told him I really appreciated his calling since Jessie had told me she quit. I finally had to ask him why she'd been terminated since he was seemingly giving me the run-around, saying what a nice girl Jessie was and how surprised he was at her actions. What actions? She was caught SHOP-LIFTING!!! I was shocked! Jessie is so spoiled and gets whatever she wants, so I was really, really surprised. And hurt. And embarrassed. I never thought a child of mine would do such a thing. And we are Catholic, Jessie being my "religious" child, so I thought she would be the last one to do such a thing. It ends up that she took about $60-70 worth of stuff, including deodorant (????) and clothes. Sometimes I DO complain about buying her clothes since she can't get into her closet it's so jammed, but deodorant??? I buy her that all the time! I didn't get to talk to her about it until the next day since she was already asleep when I talked to Wal-Mart. At first she tried to lay some of the blame on me since I rarely give her money and I don't like to buy her clothes, like I forced her into stealing! She admitted it was wrong, and that "they" had talked to her at length about it and the consequences. The manager that was on when she got caught liked her so much that he told them to simply terminate her and send her home and not involve the police. I thank God for him! She couldn't have gotten a government job with something like that on her record. I was worried that this was a chronic problem with her, but she assured me that she only did it one other time (a pack of gum) and that she wouldn't be doing anything like that ever again. I sure hope not! Her punishment from us was to scrub the bathroom from top to bottom, including the toilet which she hates to do, and we have a set of steps going down a steep hill to our lower lot that keeps growing weeds up through the steps so I told her to lay newspaper down and mulch on top of that to kill the weeds. The second job is a very exhausting and tedious one, so my hope is that she will have plenty of time to think about what she did (plus it's a job I've been needing to do myself but dreading). We've tried grounding in the past, and it doesn't do a whole lot of good, so we're now trying the heavy labor punishments. I hope it does the trick!

If any of you have had better success with different kinds of punishments I would love to hear about them!

Fran