Groomed For Failure

Around last Christmas at the pet salon I manage, we hired a new groomer. At first, things go well; she gets along with everyone she works with and customers like her work. But as the new year gets going, things start to go downhill. We end up being lucky if a single week goes by without her calling out of work at least once, as supposedly none of her children or her boyfriend can go seven days in a row without being “seriously” ill. Even when the boyfriend is healthy and the children are ill, he never seems to be able to watch them, despite not having a job.

Eventually, though she never says anything to me directly, she tells some of her coworkers that she’s planning on putting in a two-week notice soon, and not really a two-week notice, as she’s actually planning on working one week and taking Paid Time Off for the second week.

About a week before she’s supposedly going to hand in her notice, the useless girl basically decides to clock out for lunch and then never come back, without telling anyone anything. We know nothing until her next appointment arrives and is waiting for her, so we contact her to see how much longer she’s going to be on lunch. She then claims her boyfriend is in the emergency room — quelle surprise — and that she’s not coming back for the rest of the day, again without telling anybody beforehand or making any arrangements to have her appointments cancelled or rescheduled.

That’s when she finally says to me personally that she’s quitting and, despite the fact that she has appointments for the next day, she is only coming back in to collect her tools and equipment and leave. She does manage to get one thing accomplished before she leaves: putting in a request for a week’s worth of PTO, a request that I promptly deny. It wouldn’t really have mattered, anyway, since her termination was official before the PTO would have taken affect.

The kicker, though, is that when she was interviewed, she stated upfront that she would not accept the position unless it was for 40 hours a week, which we agreed to, but then she never worked that many hours a week. And she stated that the reason she was leaving was because she “couldn’t make it here” and that she wasn’t making enough money. No kidding. If you don’t bring your butt into work, not only will you be making less hourly pay, but customers then won’t know if their dog is actually going to get groomed at that appointment time. If they don’t know their dog is going to get groomed, then they’re going to stop scheduling grooms with you. Then you’re going to have less commission, as well. It’s no wonder the girl “couldn’t make it.”

She claims she found a better paying job elsewhere. One can only hope her family manages to find a way to stay healthy for longer periods of time, or else I don’t see how her new job is going to help her out much. Such a pity. She’s the only pet groomer I’ve ever seen who somehow had trouble filling up her schedule with groom dogs on a Saturday, the single busiest day of the week at the salon.