It's 4:20 somewhere!

Our latest nanny has quit after a scant 5 weeks; her husband has been transferred to California and they are moving at the end of the month. But I am not writing this to whine about how hard it is to keep good child care; no. In fact, we have already found someone we are pretty excited about to replace her. No, I’m just writing this to let you know that what I’ve heard is true: the current generation of young people looking for employment is as dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to the kind of shit about themselves they put out on the internet for public consumption.

When looking for a new nanny, I stumbled across an ad on Craiglist for someone who looked very promising. She was a college student majoring in international studies, with 10 years of experience working with kids. She seemed smart and enthusiastic, and I contacted her. We traded a couple of emails, and when she addressed her email back to me as “Hi, Wendy!” and said “2 and 5 years old sound like the PERFECT ages for me!” I didn’t want to hold it against her – after all, she spoke so enthusiastically about how she was going to work with my nonexistent five year old. We set up an appointment to meet for this morning.

And then I Googled her.

The first thing I saw was her Twitter feed, which had been updated three hours previously to inform the world that she had just scored some chronic; “fuck, yeah.” There were enough other cheesy references to pot (“Having a great 4/20!”) in her posts to indicate she has something of an affinity for the stuff.

The next site was her myspace page, complete with a sultry photograph of her showing the tops of her obviously bare breasts. The page was plastered with images of marijuana leaves and in her information section she told me and the world she was looking for other burners because she smokes every day. Additional statements like “I was bi before it was cool” and the news that her dog is a pit bull completed the jolly image of this person who wanted to take care of my children.

Now honestly, I could not care less in the abstract if someone smokes pot (although I’m not going to hire them to watch my kids when they proudly admit they do it every day and their myspace page looks like the inside of a teenaged boy’s room from 1973). Nor do I care if she is bisexual, although I’ve always thought that straddling of the middle ground was sort of a fakey construct by girls who think it makes them sound cool. I’m less thrilled with the pit bull – I don’t need pictures of my children’s beautiful faces plastered across the evening news as the latest victims of this “misunderstood” breed.

No, it’s more that this girl was stupid enough to think the world ought to know these things about her, and presumably accept her for “who she is.” After I sent her an email canceling our interview, she sent me an indignant reply latching onto the marijuana issue like I was some sort of asshole who thinks it’s OK to get politely tanked on gin and tonics but who thinks smoking weed is the mark of the beast. I gave her a little spiel about how she’s naïve to think that having that kind of stuff about herself on the internet isn’t going to interfere with getting jobs. I knew it wasn’t really my place to tell this person she ought to think about shaping the fuck up, but I did it anyway.