Profitable tardiness
Parents being late to pickup their children at daycare center has been a problem the world over. So many place charge extra fees to encourage the parents to take their children home so that staff can leave at their normal worktime. One mom says she received $96 in late pickup fees for September after her daughter’s daycare recorded her as late on 19 different days. After becoming suspicious of the lobby clock used to record pickup times, she photographed it alongside her phone during 11 pickups. The toddler mom says it was consistently about 8 minutes fast. Being charged according to a clock that’s apparently running 8 minutes ahead is another, especially when the daycare allegedly knows about the discrepancy and still considers that clock the “official time.”
The mom explained that parents sign their children out beneath a large owl clock in the daycare lobby. Pickup is required by 6 p.m., with a $1 charge for every minute afterward. She first noticed something was off in mid-September. Her car clock showed 5:56 p.m. when she parked, yet the clock showed several minutes past 6 by the time she signed her daughter out. The following day, she held her phone beside the clock and discovered an 8-minute difference. She decided to alert an employee at the front desk, then began photographing both clocks during subsequent pickups. “That’s 11 pickups, and the owl was ahead by about the same amount in EVERY one of them,” she wrote. The mom acknowledged that she already cuts pickup close, typically arriving around 5:55 p.m. according to her phone. Still, disputes between parents and daycare providers can become serious questions of trust, making an 8-minute discrepancy attached to monetary penalties difficult to ignore.
To top it off, it’s hardly the first time a money dispute has strained the relationship between a daycare and its parents. In another recent case, parents accused a daycare of withholding children’s artwork and selling it as overpriced merchandise. The daycare says its clock is the ‘official time.’ After receiving the invoice, the mom emailed the director and included her photos. According to her post, the response was straightforward: “The lobby clock is the official time for the center. We can’t adjust fees based on personal devices.” The director also pointed her toward the parent handbook, which states that sign-out times are recorded according to the center’s clock. The mom acknowledged that she signed the handbook in July. As a “one-time-only” compromise, the director allegedly offered to halve the fees to $48, yet no one agreed to fix the clock’s time. That’s where Reddit commenters became suspicious. Several have accused the daycare of deliberately keeping the clock fast to generate additional late fees, although there’s no evidence in the post establishing why the clock is inaccurate. One commenter suggested arriving 8 minutes before the daycare opens according to real-world time and seeing whether employees would accept the child because their own clock says they’re already open.
Better late than never
The manager called a meeting for the whole office and lectured them about their tardiness making it very clear that such conduct would not be tolerated. The next morning everyone showed up early, but because the lock system codes had been changed, they could not get anywhere but the lobby of the building. 8 o’ clock came and went while the workers stood around the lobby waiting for someone with a new keycard to let them in. As they watched the big clock in lobby the office manager came in with the new keycard, 20 minutes late.
Alex, my freshman roommate, was famous for sleeping through his class time. One morning a classmate and I returned from the lectures to find Alex just stirring. “I called out, “Hey Alex you have missed your three morning classes, do you have any others?” He yawned and stretched and replied: “No, I am done for the day.”
An inept burglar figured he had too much loot from a Connecticut apartment to carry down the street so he called for a cab and no one came to get him, he called again and waited, and again and again. Before the cab got there, the police did and arrested him with the goods. He complained to the cops as he went to jail, “I will never call that cab company again.”
A coed was trying to convince her father on the phone that she needed to buy a sweat suit to exercise in. The father suggested that she had enough clothes that she could wear to go jogging. He asked, “Why can you just run in your jeans and a T-shirt?” The young lady explained, “Dad, you have to wear a sweat suit, otherwise no one knows you are exercising. They just think you are late.”
October 7th Birthdays
1986 – Holland Roden, 1974 – Allison Munn, 1997 – Kira Kosarin, 1991 – Ayla Kell
1955 – Yo Yo Ma, 1959 – Simon Cowell, 1953 – Vlad Putin, 1931 – Desmond Tutu