Piles of rodent droppings and piss covered the floor when Sam moved out. Our cleaning lady wore a mask and gloves to clean her room. It was disgusting.
A photo of the poop and piss left behind by Samantha Freidman. Now I know why she left in a hurry.
The air conditioner cord that Sam taped up to conceal the damage — or perhaps she just wanted to use the air conditioner. The point is, she saw the damage and said nothing, and she did nothing to stop her rodent from eating all my furniture.
Note to Samantha Freidman: Please next time you knowingly destroy something that does not belong to you, have some honor and compensate the owner for the damage you have caused. At least, Sam, admit what you have done and apologize. That’s only decent.
The like-new leather chair after Sam’s rodent destroyed it.
Samantha Freidman, it is hard to believe a 24-year-old woman would be so irresponsible as to allow her pet to destroy someone else s home and furnishings. Would your mother in Newtown, PA like it if a babysitter came into her home and did this sort of damage and then just left without saying anything?
I hope your next job you have the honesty and decency to not destroy other people’s belongings.
My halogen lamp. The cord has been gnawed so that is in unsafe to use. Thanks Sam.
Samantha Freidman — not only did your pet destroy furnishings, it was a safety and helth hazard to my family. This damaged lamp could have caused a fire, and the poop and piss all over the floors was certainly not sanitary for a child to be living around.
Definitely not cool.
This is the headboard of my designer Ashland & Hill platform bed. Sam F’s chinchilla nibbled all along the headboard, the platform and the bed’s legs.
Samantha Freidman, not being able to afford to pay for the damage you caused is no excuse for you running out and leaving another person’s home in this condition. You could have made payments or asked your parents to help — whatever it took to do the decent thing.
When you are selling Sensy you must have a sensitivity to the fact that people want their homes to be pleasant and odor free. So why would you leave piles of rodent poop and puddles of piss in someone’s house?
By the boxes left in her former room, it was clear Sam had not “moved out” after all.
She came back to the house, even though I had texted her that I would take care of my son that day, and she went into her former room and shut the door. A little later, a strange man came to our house and went into her room. Then he helped her take out some boxes, and she rode away with him in his car. By the brief conversation I overheard, it seemed she did not know this man. It was all very bizarre.
I went online to see if her Twitter feed might offer a clue as to what she was up to. Well, once again, Sam did not disappoint by disappointing. The night before she had been trolling online for strangers to come help her move out. She said she was going to stay at her friend’s house, deemed the Pussy House. A man intrigued by her mention of this moniker began an online conversation with her. After a few exchanges with this stranger, she asked him to come help her move, and she gave him the address of our home.
Sam once again proved she had no discretion. No responsibly. She invited a strange man she met in a strange way into our home. Once again, she carelessly jeopardized my family’s safety and security. Despite being an avid user of Facebook, Twitter, etc., Samantha Friedman did not obverse any precautions to protect my son and my family from a crime perpetrated through social media, which is more and more becoming common place.
Okay, so I have some responsibly here. I let this person stay in my home even after the red flags. Here I do take some blame. I wanted to get rid of her after the first “fainting spell” and unexplained vomiting, but I did not. I saw via Twitter and her blog that she was unstable, and that she was plotting to quit and leave, but I did not confront or fire her.
I kept wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt. She seemed so nice, personable, funny and smart. My son also seemed to like her, and she was helpful around the house in ways that other nannies had not been. She took out the trash and emptied the dishwasher on occasion. She was also mostly very quiet while in her room, and she cleaned up after herself in the kitchen, so she seemed an ideal roommate. So when I saw the signs of trouble, I ignored them, or denied them. I wanted things to work out, and in general I try to give people a lot of latitude and try to see the best in them.
My partner pretty much backed away from making any decision in the matter. Oddly, Sam thought that she and my partner were friends, or at least friendly, but ironically it was my partner who constantly told me about Sam’s erratic behavior and warned me that she was “crazy.” My partner has a way of hiding how she feels about people. She is nice to their face, but in reality she may really dislike a person or not trust him or her. This was the case with Sam. My partner even went on a 6-K run with Sam, pretending to like her, but when they got back from the run, and other outings, she would tell me all about how “nuts” Sam was.
So while my partner would regularly say disparaging things about Sam, she did nothing outward to let on that she was anything but happy with her. This facade of friendship deceived Sam into confiding to my partner that she thought I might be “spying” on her via Twitter. Sam claimed to my partner that one day when she tweeted that she was at the end of her rope, that I came and offered to help out. Ironically, this never happened. If I ever offered to help out it was just a coincidence that Sam had been complaining about her job.
Whatever the reason I exercised bad judgment and let her stay longer than I should have, the ending of this situation assured me that I should have gone with my gut and let her go when I first suspected she had issues.
Back to the day of her leaving.
On her last day — which was not really her last day, as she owed us a week of work, but that aside, it was the last day I would ever see her — Sam picked up my son from school and took him to the park. She and I continued to have email and text exchanges as she said she was trying to work out a ride so she could babysit the next day. She said getting a ride would be difficult because she was staying Orange County. This I knew as a lie. I knew from reading her Tweets that she was staying with her friend Eva, an actress from Harry Potter, just a few blocks away.
By this time I was very uncomfortable with her watching my son. She had proved she was unstable in more ways than one, and now she was outright lying to me. I called her and told her to bring my son home and that I would watch him the rest of the day. She said she didn’t want to come to the house because she was worried I was mad at her and I might, “punch her in the head.” I tried to remain calm. “Okay,” I said. “I think it would be best if you just bring (my son) home now, and you can get your things and go.”
At this point I realized I didn’t know who Sam was. She had let the crazy out of the bag. I didn’t want her in my home again, and I didn’t want her near my son. I closed all the doors to the rooms in the house so that when she came back she would not be able to go anywhere but to “her room” to get the remainder of her things AND GO.
Then I waited. The park was just minutes away, but 15 minutes passed, and still she was not back with my son. Then 20, then 30 minutes passed. When 45 minutes had gone by. I began to worry.
I texted her to be home within the next five minutes.
I waited. 10 minutes went by. I reached for the phone to call the police. Just then, I heard her out front.
She and a young woman were coming into the courtyard with my son in his stroller. I went to get my son, and Sam pushed by, looking frantic.
Her friend also pushed her way into the house. I realized she must have brought this person for “protection.” Both of them had a hysterical, crazed look to them. She had clearly gotten this other person worked up with her delusions about the situation.
Sam began banging around her room grabbing her things. My son was confused and asking what was happening. I tried to console him and said, “Sam is just leaving. Remember I told you she needed to go back to live with her mother.”
Within a few minutes, Sam had cleared out. I was standing in the courtyard with my son behind me when I saw her and her friend running out of the side door of the house.
I was worried for my son, who was witnessing this scene. He had already had three nannies come and go. He was attached to Sam and sad about her leaving.
I tried to speak as calmly and normally as possible. I said to Sam, “Did you say ‘goodbye’ to (my son)?”
“Yes, I told him,” she said over her shoulder, as she ran through the gate, as if I were after her.
It was a crazy scene. It was an experience I never want to relive.
She was gone at last. But the remnants remained. More in the next post…
Once Sam left, I discovered that her chinchilla had destroyed every piece of furniture in the room which she occupied in my home. It chewed the bed, the TV stand, the dresser, the desk and the chair. It even chewed the window blinds, the air conditioner cord, an expensive halogen lamp cord, a portable heater cord and the wall boards. The clincher is that Samantha Friedman knew that her animal was doing this damage, and she did nothing to prevent it, mitigate it or repair it. She did try to cover it up. In fact, she taped the air conditioner cord with white tape to conceal the damage — or maybe it was just so she could us the air conditioner. What is definitely clear is that she knew about the damage.
When she finally informed us she would be moving back to Newtown, PA, it was around March 1. She said she would leave in a month, so I began interviewing new nannies based on an April 1 start date. Then Sam advised me that she was taking a week off to go to Texas to visit a friend. It was really rather nervy of her to ask this, since she had just given notice, but I agreed, in order to be cordial, as she was still going to be taking care of my son for another several weeks.
As expected, Sam took advantage of this courtesy, and upon her return from TX she told me she was leaving a week sooner than she had agreed. When I nicely reminded her that in accordance with our agreement she owed us a week of babysitting due to her vacation — after all she was getting the benefit of the room at our home — whether or not she used it was irrelevant . I proposed that if she wanted to stay an extra week and not work off her vacation time that she could pay for the room based on the rate that we had previously rented the room.
Sam balked at this, saying in that case she would leave two weeks sooner. I reminded her that even though she might leave sooner, she still owed us the week of babysitting. Sam could not wrap her head around the idea that she should honor her agreement. She argued that she had given me three weeks notice. It did not seem to register to her that she had only worked one week of that time. I informed her that giving two weeks notice means that you work for two weeks, not take a vacation for one of those weeks. This did not make sense to Sam.
That night I heard banging and shuffling around in Sam’s room. The next day I found a note from Sam saying she had moved out, but that she would be back to take care of Stephen one last day. I texted her and told her not to worry. I would take care of him. She did need to come back.
Her door to her room was shut, but since she said she had moved out, I opened the door. Previously I never went into her room, out of respect for her privacy. But when I went into her room I saw many boxes and belongings still in my house. I left the door open and used the room as a short-cut to the laundry room. Since Sam had “moved out,” according to her, I felt she had no rights to the room any longer. In fact, she did not, as she was stiffing us a week of work, so officially, the room was no longer hers.
Despite my text telling her not to come back, Sam arrived a few minutes later. She was bubbly and said she just needed to get a few more of her things, and she said she would pick up Stephen from school and watch him until my partner got home. Then she went into her room and shut the door.
I thought it was odd that she closed the door when it was not her room any longer, but I let it go. Now I realize, she was hiding the condition of the room and furnishings. When I had gone into the room earlier, I had just breezed through it. I had not noticed the extensive damage that I would soon discover. More in the next post.
