One day at work last week this woman came in to get a manicure and a pedicure. Two full hours of service. She comes up to the front desk to check in while balancing a car seat holding a less-than-one-year-old little girl and clutching the hand of a little boy no older than ten. The other receptionists and I look at each other with questioning eyes. What does she expect to do with these two children while having her piggies polished?
She left them in the waiting room while she went back into the spa to pamper herself. Left them in the waiting room. For two full hours. All alone.
At this point, I'm kind of doubting her parenting skills. Not once, during the two hour stint does she come out to check on her infant daughter or her way-too-young-to-be-watching-an-infant-son. Not when he started wandering around the waiting room pocketing eight-dollar bottles of nail polish. Not when he found the computer hidden behind the plant for use by employees only and began banging on the keyboard in an impeccable Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation only to stop when the manager of the salon asked him politely to knock it off. Not when he started tipping his little sisters car seat almost completely upside down only to stop when I decided it wasn't a good idea to have an infant child hanging two feet from the air by the straps of her little seat. "Mom" didn't say anything when her little boy decided to start whistling a tune that turned out to be no tune at all. He simply whistled at will for twenty-five minutes only to stop when his sister began to scream and he couldn't get her to quiet down. The "mom" finally came out, annoyed because her pedicure was cut short, after letting her infant daughter screamed for, oh, 20 minutes or so. The icing on the cake? She wouldn't pick up her visibly unhappy baby daughter because she didn't want to smudge her freshly polished nails.
Now, I've never had any children of my own but does this seem inappropriate to anyone else? Maybe I'm not akin to this new form of parenting skills. New skills that include letting your children fend for themselves. Survival of the fittest. If that infant child cannot handle hanging upside down from her car seat then, sorry to say, but she won't make it in this dog-eat-dog world. Am I right? Is this now how we do this thing called parenting?
2 comments:
wow. Did the manager do anything about this? Because it's a spa, not a day care, and there should have been a policy that you and the other receptionists should have alerted her to right away (no unsupervised minors are permitted.. that kind of thing).
If management hasn't done anything....wow.
I'm really hoping that the manager told her a thing or two, but somehow I doubt it.
I worked in a spa once upon a time. The owner would call her nanny in to help with the laundry when we were short staffed, while her 4 year old son would run screaming through the spa. The really funny thing is that the owner has won awards and had "woman of the year" galas thrown for her, while she would show up 20 minutes late for a staff meeting (no apologies) and then yell at her employees for taking a sick day. Apparently she didn't think it was bad for her staff to be sniffling and coughing while giving massages or facials. Even though one of those clients got strep after being treated by an esthetician with strep.
She's still in business, and her business continues to grow...... ugh.
No, the manager did nothing other than stop the boy from banging on the keyboard of a computer. Other than that, she simply sighed with relief once the "mom" left.
I agree, there should be some sort of policy because some people are quite obviously not smart enough to realize that it's inappropriate to leave you children to the will of total strangers for a few hours while you take some "me time."
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