This Post is About Me Being Sad.

So, I was supposed to start a new nannying job on the 10th.

This job was arranged through Care.com. I almost got a FANTASTIC job through them a few weeks ago, but ended up getting passed over for someone else, so I was pretty confident about this job I was supposedly getting. The woman was going to move here from New York for work purposes and had a six year-old son who was temporarily in a wheelchair due to an injury. She was going to pay me in advance for the first week and also give me money to pay for the wheelchair she was having delivered to Terre Haute.

I’ll be honest, I ignored a lot of warning signs, the biggest being that she seemed completely unable to spell or form a coherent sentence. But I need a job, badly, and I’ve been turned down for three editing/proofreading jobs so far and I’m just feeling kind of down, and honestly getting a little desperate. So I ignored the spammer-speak, and the fact that never gave me any contact info beyond her email address, and the fact that she said her name was Rose Joyce but the “from” field of her emails always said “Joyce Rose”, and that no matter how many times I asked she never told me what her new address in Terre Haute was going to be.

The check arrived yesterday, almost $3000. Most of it was supposed to be for the wheelchair seller, who would arrive to drop off the wheelchair after I notified “Rose Joyce” that the check had been received and deposited.

My bank raised its eyebrows when it saw the check. Their initial reason for getting suspicious was that it had “an incomplete signature”, except it didn’t. Perfectly legal electronic signature stamp. Honestly, everything about the check was legal. In fact, it was SO legal that, if the routing and account numbers on it had worked (nobody checked), the company or person or whomever that account belonged to couldn’t say jack about me ending up with their money.

After a phone conversation I couldn’t hear, they told me that they were going to have some service of theirs or whatever investigate. Their reason for THAT? It was a large check, and I had “so little money in my account.” Um, what? I’m not quite sure what the implication was there, but I was insulted all the same. So I said, “fine, whatever” and Chris of binary expletive paid for lunch even though I’d said I would.

Then the check came back fraudulent. As did the bank that issued it, and the company that “Rose Joyce” supposedly works for.

I spent a long time crying and trying to think about what to do. I wanted to send “Rose Joyce” an email saying, “I hope you feel good about yourself, trying to swindle a 23-year-old college student just looking for a job.” Eventually I just sent a profession, polite, but succinct email that essentially said, “I’m onto you, our business is concluded, I don’t believe there is any further reason for us to communicate any longer.” Probably I shouldn’t have even done that.

What to do from this point? I still need a job. I’ve got about three dozen applications out there, but so far I’ve not heard back from anyone, and that’s just local stuff. I’m sending in inquiries and applications to see if I can get work doing that proofreading/editing thing, but that’s starting off slowly, if at all. In another week or two, if I still have nothing, I’ll go work at Sony, I guess. But I really don’t want to work at Sony. I can do twelve-hour shifts, four days on, four days off, on my feet the entire time doing menial factory work, but… yeah, I don’t have to justify not wanting do that.

I guess I’ll just keep trying. Keep me in your thoughts, guys, and if you can give me any leads, let me know.