Never in a million years did I think I would have to take time out of my life to create another blog to tell another story of being victimized by yet another person that somehow thinks they deserve far more than they worked for.
Welcome to Dear Jenniffer (TWO N's and TWO F's) a victims story about how a woman came into my life through me giving back to the community and systematically and with much effort destroy and take away everything I had left from the last person who did this. That story is at www.JiltedWings.com.
Let me introduce you to my employee, Jenniffer Pope, who at the time was approximately 39 years old when she was sent to me through the Job council for a job offer that I had in my long standing business. I was looking for someone new because my current employee was causing serious issues with my customers and treating them very poorly and had heard just about enough from my customers. Unfortunately, in my line of work it takes quite some time to get an employee trained and up to speed, plus with my injuries from my assault in 2012, it made it hard to do a full days by myself in my massive shipping business. I often had to keep employees on longer than I wanted until I can get someone else up to speed. This was the case late 2014.
Many years ago, I was on welfare for a short period of time when I had my son and his father decided not to participate or help, but I went to school during that time to better myself. I didnt use it as a crutch, but as a help up. That is also during the time that I had my first daughter and months later met my now ex-husband that later tried to take my life. This story is the one mentioned in the opening of this post. I am not going to go deep into the history of the store as it has been told already, but I always knew that I was going to pay it forward. I went through Job Council back in the early 90's and they helped me tremendously. I ended up walking out of their office, self-employed and have never looked back. So when I have a fairly successful business that I had been building and running by myself for years and it came time for employees, I wanted to use programs like Job Council. I knew that I was going to be dealing with people that either has never worked before or had little skills, etc. I was prepared for that. Over the course of 8 years, I hired exclusively through Job Council with the exception of 3 employees, two of which were former business owners and the best employees I could ever have and the one that I was currently trying to get rid of and what brought Jenniffer to my store. Most of the employees that I hired through Job Council, well let's just say I could write a book about that. A story for another day.
Jenniffer came to me through Job Council, she was on county assistance but had worked for one of our large employers here in Grants Pass, Oregon for 8 years. I asked her what happened there and she said that she was let go because they no longer had that position and nowhere to put her. Which of course, was not the truth. If I had been told the truth, I would not be writing this blog right now. She seemed nice enough, nice appearance and I hired her. Within 2 months of her being there, I fired the other employee on the spot when two customers came in with the same complaint of being treated extremely rude and a binder thrown towards them on the counter. I could not believe what I was hearing, later when he was gone the stories that customers told me made me sick to my stomach, but no one was coming in to tell me. They didn't want to hurt my feelings. I have been in business in this town now for nearly 18 years and I took good care of my customers. Oh, how I wish I would have known earlier, as that employee was also stealing from my store. After so many years in business, you become complacent and trusting. I trusted my employees completely, I did not realize that I was needing to be on the lookout for evil. I am a fixer, so even when they have problems I think I can just fix them. I no longer am that way, and this new employee, Jenniffer is the sole reason.
So here I am with just me and Jenniffer. I had been struggling the year before as I was saddled with tremendous debt from the criminal case and subsequent divorce and was forced to pay over $86,000 in debt in under 3 years. Having an employee, the payroll, taxes, etc were very hard but no matter what payroll was covered. They got their paycheck. I helped them whenever they needed to borrow money, take time off for classes, emergencies, etc. Heck, I had one employee that had an emergency with her child 4 hours away and had no vehicle...I handed her $200 cash and the keys to my truck and sent her on her way. That is who I am and I realize now that is why I am in the place I am today. So it became apparent really quickly that Jenniffer was going to be one of those employees that was going to be late all the time and that I have to keep on to get her job done. But she tried really hard and I just kept wanting her to succeed. Over the course of the first year we got close, our kids, our lives, etc. My number one mistake. I cared for her and her children, and listened to some of the most outrageous excuses I have ever heard and known most weren't true but I had at that time learned that she had severe adult ADHS so alot of the things I was dealing with could be attributed to that. I kept telling her that her job was in jeopardy if she could not get a handle on her issues. These issues included being late, not opening the store on time or at all, not getting her daily work done or at all, going to the bathroom 15 times a day, putting her makeup on and doing her hair in the morning on my time before I came in. I eventually had to write her up after I had left for a conference for a week during the early summer of 2016 and came back to $2000 missing. I had brought on a volunteer through Job Council to teach them marketable skills, so there were two people and I could not blame just one, however, Jenniffer was ultimately responsible. So the write up included this and numerous lates, and absences and so on. She signed it.