The Nightmare Before Christmas

That which I could not mention has now been resolved, although I am still fuming that this particular piece of nonsense took seven weeks to sort out.

My son, D, works as a trainee manager for a well known supermarket chain. By all accounts he is highly thought of and popular with customers and staff alike. He had also met the love of his life through working in his particular store as she also works there part time. Since he met her he has not so far as I am aware looked twice at another female – and has in fact been known to row with his younger brother if in his opinion his brother was being too friendly with another female because his brother is also in a long term relationship and D is firmly of the opinion that you must never flirt with anyone else when you have a Significant Other.

So therefore it was, to say the least, something of a shock to us all when D, was suspended from work two days before Christmas (a Wednesday) due to two young girls alleging he had sexually harassed them.

On the Tuesday evening D had been working and these two girls were supposed to have been stacking some shelves. Over the course of the evening, D kept having to speak to them about their complete lack of progress. I gather they did not take kindly to being told their work was not acceptable.

The next day D went to work as usual, but was summoned to the office and told serious allegations had been made against him. He was suspended on full pay until a hearing set for 6th January.

Naturally he was absolutely distraught, but his major fear at first was not that he might loose his job, but that he might loose his girlfriend. Luckily she knew him well enough to know at once that it was all lies, and an attempt to get back at him for the words that were exchanged on the previous night.

Now of course D is my son, and I love him dearly, and we all hear mothers of vile men announce to the world at large that they know their son and he would not do whatever it happens to be that he stands accused of. I would always defend him even when I might fear he had done wrong. In this instance though I did not for a single second consider there could be any truth in this at all and I never doubted that that would be proven to be the case. I was however incandescent with rage that such allegations had been made, although I understood why the store had to suspend him pending investigation of the claims.

What I suspect is that the girls aim was to cause trouble between D and his girlfriend. This suspicion was somewhat enhanced when the first thing one of them did was to contact D’s girlfriend via Facebook to detail in gory detail what D had been doing to her. I don’t think they had the faintest idea that their accusations would lead to a major investigation which would eventually lead to practically every member of staff being interviewed by Head Office employees.

I told D to just treat it as unexpected paid holiday over Christmas, and to try and put it to the back of his mind. Easy for me to say of course, but we did succeed in having a good time over the Festive Season, whilst mentally crossing off the days till 6th January when all would be resolved.

Expect that on the 6th January we had snow. We had so much snow the guy charged with doing the investigation could not get to the store to see D and the meeting was cancelled.

I will not go into detail about what caused further delays but they included sickness, incompetence and holidays. Finally – this Wednesday just gone -D was told that he was completely exonerated, not a scrap of evidence having been unearthed to show that he had done the things they alleged, or even that any other colleagues considered him capable of acting in such a manner.

It might be supposed that as the investigation dragged on and on I might have had second thoughts about whether there was in fact a shred of truth in what they said D got up to but I never did. Partly I never did because I know D, but a major part of why I never doubted him was because of the words of the girls themselves.

In written statements and in their Facebook exchanges with his girlfriend they declared that there was a pattern to his behaviour and that the sexual harassment which began about last September always occurred on a Tuesday.



The Tuesday of the dispute over the shelf stacking was the only Tuesday D had worked for the past six months.




Oh, and on Wednesday but before he had heard that he was fully cleared, he had a call from the manager of another store who had heard what had been going on (what price confidentiality eh?), but thought it was a load of shit, and asked D if he would consider coming to work as his deputy (ie, a promotion from his current role) and with better shifts that he has been working at his store. Not surprisingly, D has accepted his offer.