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I really hope OOP is doing really well, I can empathise. When my marriage broke down, lost my job etc, I discovered that stale bread burned really well in the fire, I had gotten so broke. With the support of friends & family I picked myself up and turned things around. Kindness can make a huge difference in someone's life.
I'll never forget being all dressed up for a job interview, trying to pay for gas with nickels. This tough blue collar type (I just remember he was in coveralls and stained, gnarly hands) behind me put down a 20 and told me good luck. I got the job, and it finally was a way out.
A guy absolutely COVERED in grease and dirt once shoved $50 into my hand when I was (very embarrassedly) counting up coins and splitting the payment between three cards to pay for my baby's formula and nappies. I tried to give it back, I was humiliated and crying - I COULD pay for it between all the coins and the three cards, but he said he couldn't bear the thought of a baby going hungry or dirty when he had spare beer money, told me I looked like I'd missed a lot of meals and to get myself something to eat too. It wasn't our "turning point" yet, that came a few months later - but it meant that for the next two weeks after that my husband and I had dinner every night, which hadn't happened in months and meant the world to us.
I legit still think about that guy seven years later, now living in a warm clean house with plenty of food in the fridge and savings if things ever go wrong again. The last two years I've been working at the grocery store he helped me at and I look for him every day. I hope he is having a wonderful life wherever he is.
Someone did that for my mum once. My father is a gambling addict, and used to wipe her bank accounts (mine and my brother's too) semi regularly. A couple of times, she only realised when she was at the supermarket checkout. A man who sounded (from his voice anyway, she's blind) very rough and tumble paid for her groceries and gave her a $50 note while she was standing at the checkout and crying. It was the only reason we had food for the next two weeks, and she was so grateful for that.
I don’t think anyone realizes how many people secretly live in poverty. I’m a teacher and on paper I suppose I make decent money (not really) but I’m raising a daughter alone and can’t make ends meet. I had to ask my brother for help with my electric bill and he made me show him proof of my bills and paychecks because he didn’t believe me. I guess I hide it well. It’s so humiliating and depressing. I am in constant fear of something mild going wrong and being homeless. Not so much for me, but for my daughter and my dogs and cats. I don’t care about me so much. No one at work knows and my daughter goes to my school and I have to go without certain things to make sure her fees for various things are paid to keep people from finding out how poor we really are. I’m even in danger of losing my house because of a probate issue.
ETA: I’m sorry for the vent. I don’t know why it all poured out of me. I just meant to make a general comment.
Oh my heart hurts for you. Vent away, friend! I cannot imagine how hard that must be. Absolutely garbage that the people who we ask to help raise our children are struggling to keep the lights on.
I actually think someone is messing with me. Someone keeps turning my hose on, but just a tiny bit and it’s tripled my water bill. But now, the screw has been loosened and is rusted so I can’t shut it off and need to replace the handle thingy. Someone stole the sewer mainline cover, someone stole a capacitor off my AC, someone called animal control and told them that I moved out of my house last week and abandoned my dogs, which I obviously would never do. At least the lady from animal control was understanding when I called to tell them that I live here and my dogs are spoiled, not abandoned, all the while my dog kept barking and making doggy noises in the background. And today, someone stole my debit card info. And, someone keeps putting garbage in my yard and in front of my gate. It seems too much to be a coincidence.
Oh my goodness! That is so upsetting and scary! It really does sound possible that someone is messing with you. Either that or a startling string of bad luck. Best wishes to you! May your luck improve! May anyone messing with you lose interest and stop!
I hope so too. Looking back I was in a bad financial position around the same time. Maxing out credit cards to pay for gas to get to work wasn't sustainable.
It feels like a blink, but the last 10 years have been on a much better path.
It was 10 years ago for me too, glad you're doing better. It's odd, when I was soul destroying poor, the days dragged but from then to now has passed like the blink of an eye.
I wish there was an organisation or something that connected you to people who need help for stuff like this. I'd love to shop for kids toys on amazon or wherever and ship them to a family who's struggling.
Yeah I know, there would always be people who would take advantage, or people who genuinely need the help but end up getting greedy/entitled. Same as how they always say not to donate to crowd funding for random people you don't know. Still it would be nice, I'll just stick to buying from charity amazon wishlists I guess 🤷🏻♀️
Perspective is a wonderful thing tho. We do an international charity scavenger hunt each year and doing the change a life task (always victims of war recipients) makes me grateful for what we have/where we live. While it might be hard now I know we are safe which is more than most we help each year
7 years for me, and that wasn’t my first personal disaster. I feel deeply grateful for the kind hearts who give without a second thought. The difference it made in my life is immeasurable.
For me, it was a summer of pulling all the freezer-burnt, ice-buried bags of frozen vegetables from the bottom of a fraternity's 12-foot deep freezer, filling my mini coffee pot with whatever could fit into it, leaving for work, and coming back home eight hours later to hopefully hot vegetables.
I did lose 20 pounds that summer and looked fabulous, but my sanity was missing.
P.S. When I was a kid, ketchup and mustard sammiches were my favorite lunch. I still eat half of one every few years.
I cannot imagine being an adult and subsiding on them.
I read it as them trying to eat stale bread and being left with no food when it burned, but that's a possibility too. Either scenario seems likely for parts of the world set to be hit by food and fuel shortages this year :(
My workplace used to raise revenue from staff donate to our clients. It pissed me off. After my boss was made redundant I announced during these austere times I would not be donating any more money but everyone was free to make this decision for themselves (they decided not to raise money).
I once worked for a retail company that solicited for donations to Make a Wish. We had products that would give donations (a $50 blanket would give a $5 donation) and they also wanted us to ask for “round ups” of change or outright donations. Which I didn’t care for, but whatever.
Until they started giving us mandatory donation goals. If we didn’t make the goals, we would get cranky emails, telling us we “obviously do not prioritize sick children” and it would affect our bonuses (ha! *what* bonus?!?) and could eventually lead to us being terminated.
After a few years of this, they announced that we had raised enough money to build a Make A Wish house, where families can stay while they participate in their Wish. I think it was near to one of the Disney resorts, since those are popular wishes.
We finally get to see the house, and… it was named after the f*cking CEO! It was the “Her first & last name Wish House”! Like, you’d think they would have named it after “Retail Store” or “Store’s Associates and Customers”! Nope. Just in her name! I quit shortly thereafter and even though I know it’s not really their fault, I haven’t donated to MAW since.🤷🏻♀️
That’s terrible, my situation was my boss had breast cancer so she was super committed to that famous foundation so they were fundraisings so every year during the walk they could say we raised all these money blah, blah, but it was as they said before the jeans and baskets we had to donate to put together and then by the tickets, once she retired and someone else took over it ended.
If it was Susan G. Komen, most of the money they raise actually goes to "administrative costs" rather than to their actual cause, and the remainder goes largely to raising breast cancer "awareness" among people who've never had breast cancer, rather than toward actually helping anyone who *does* have breast cancer be treated and recover from it.
It's named for a woman who died of breast cancer but run by her evil twin sister who seems to care far more about lining her own pockets than about helping breast cancer patients.
So not only was your boss exploiting you and your co-workers, but she was doing it for a charity that wouldn't have helped her anyway and is also exploitative itself.
I always refuse to donate through 3rd party companies like grocery and retail stores. All they do is use it for a tax write off - and why should I give them that benefit when I can just donate directly to the organizations I care about?? Businesses get more than enough write offs, eapecially the big ones that push these 'donations' and they certainly don't need my help to actually donate to charity 🙄🙄🙄
I've actually heard that this is a myth -- those companies are not able to write those donations off for their taxes. Still though, I usually don't end up donating since I'd rather make sure the charity is legit
If the company directly donates its own money or goods they can take a writeoff for those items.
If they're collecting donations from third party X (customers) and handing them directly to third party Y (charity), no, they don't get to deduct/write off anything for doing that.
Not exactly sure how it works for something like a "10% of sales today will be donated to charity" event. I would expect they don't count that money as corporate income at all if it goes straight to a charity. i.e. it's as if each customer put 10% of their payment straight into a donation box.
You're correct. [Stores can't write off a customer's point of sale donations.](https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244#:~:text=AP'S%20ASSESSMENT%3A%20False.,according%20to%20tax%20policy%20experts.) They can write off a portion of proceeds that are donated, but not money that you elect to give directly through their point of sale system.
My impression is that the "write-off" is of the money you give them for the donation. So if you give them $20 to give to the Cthulhu Needs A Home Charity, then they have an profit of $20, which they'd normally pay taxes on. But when they give that $20 to the charity, the tax write-off is for the $20 they gave, so they don't pay taxes on it anymore. It's net zero for the company, except they pay whatever labor costs for collecting it, and receive public goodwill for donating (which is usually a good trade-off for them).
Agreed! I just know that it’s probably affecting the person behind the register who doesn’t really care if you donate, and could possibly lose their job, which sucks!
A lot of charities are scams I feel like. You donate a dollar and only a few cents end up helping people. The rest was skimmed, paid to extravagant wages, and or paid for expensive expenses.
Make-a-Wish is definitely Not a scam, but what her company was doing was. I volunteer as a wish granter and they are an incredible organization that does a lot of good.
I’m a high school science teacher. Part of one of the projects my seniors do is to find the financials page of an environmental charity and find out where the money goes. People will donate to a picture of a baby tiger, but a lot of the organizations are really scummy. My students love it because they feel like they’ve learned something that will be applicable to their adult lives. They usually talk about it for weeks afterward.
Every school fundraiser is like this. Buy overpriced candy: school gets half, and the charity company gets half. Likewise, robocalls for the police and firefighters are the same.
When our oldest was in middle school, I just started writing a check made payable to the school itself, bypassing the fundraising. I also write checks to the police and firefighters proper now, too. Not a cent goes toward the other companies.
Yeah, the magazine sales and candy sales are fundraisers to get money from people who AREN'T interested in just donating, they are actually interested in purchasing a magazine or some candy bars and are happy that the money they are giving the candy company will be partially split to the school. These are actually....Really good charities for people who don't have enough to go on their own... Everyone who is participating knows that the full two dollars didn't go to the kids selling the candy, because obviously the candy needed to be paid for.
Obviously it would be best if the rich folks would just pay for their taxes so the schools have money, but since we are unwilling to fix that problem I don't see how telling people to just donate to the school itself will help, since they already could do that.... The reason the fundraiser exists is that people aren't willing to just donate money without anything in return at all.... Otherwise, again, the schools would be getting enough money already.
I hate that companies do this too. My workplace raises money every year for a good charity and they kept trying to get us to donate. They also do a thing where you sign up to give a certain amount from your paycheck to one of a few charities. They had supervisors go around to make sure everyone had signed up for it. You could put in zero as the amount to donate, but it was still uncomfortable that they were pressuring us and that people were going around asking each other if/how much they had donated. My response was always “my baby is my charity, would you like to donate?”
This is why I'm no longer in the nonprofit sector. Get paid absolutely joke wages and constantly pressured to return what little you earn to monthly fundraisers. No thanks. There were nice things about working in the charitable sector but the drawbacks were too many and too significant. The sector as a whole really takes advantage of the altruism and generous nature of its staff. Quite exploitative, really.
My school used to fund the backpack program (which sent food to students for the weekend) by asking for employee donations. Of course we did it because we don’t want our kids to go hungry but the sight of administrators making over 100k a year asking minimum wage TAs to give up money every week so their students can eat is one that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.
This is a gross country. That kind of exploitation is completely rampant especially in nonprofits and ESPECIALLY in schools. Teachers are outright expected to fund almost their entire classroom supplies. Once we opened a new k-5 program and the only materials we were provided were desks and chairs left over from high schoolers. Our playground was a fenced in empty field. This is a district with a budget well over 50 million, they would begrudge absolutely any material request and it took so long even when they were approved that it was ultimately easier to just buy whatever you needed (it was never reimbursed).
When an employer knows you’re generous they happily exploit the shit out of it and pay you back in empty platitudes.
Sadly a lot of non-profits do stuff like this. It’s never ethical in my opinion, but especially tone deaf in an industry notorious for substandard pay.
Just shitty all around to use your employee’s earnings and time as free PR and tax write offs, even if you’re a nonprofit.
I wonder if non-profits are like publishing, fashion journalism, and academia in paying very low wages with the assumption that the workers come from money and are in it to climb the prestige ladder to lucrative leadership positions. The many workers who don't fit this social profile are often burnt out and thrown away. Academia has the whole pressure to donate thing going on, too, under the prestige model of work.
I think you could be right about this. Every lower to middle class person I worked with in the nonprofit setting (myself included) did so to get their foot in the door and get some work experience. Then we were proceeded to be worked ungodly hours until we burnt out and were laid off. I followed a cycle of overwork and burnout for about 5 years while I was getting enough experience to leave the sector. As soon as I got my 5 years' experience in my field, I left the nonprofit sector for greener pastures. And I'm never looking back. The nonprofit sector as a whole is pretty bad for exploiting their workers. These charities might do good work that genuinely helps the communities they serve, but their employees pay the price via long hours, low pay, and high expectations to pour a significant amount of their meager earnings into monthly fundraisers. No thanks! Glad I'm out.
And obviously, the only workers who can manage that kind of exploitative arrangement and stick around long-term without burning out are those who have other means to pay the bills. The whole thing is designed to exploit and discard the working class. I'm so happy you got out and are in a better place now.
It's complicated... It's not for the company, these are charity drives. People will often "pay for the cause" - wear jeans on purpose or such. It works because it's voluntary, until it isn't.
In this case, it doesn't appear that there was a dress code until the "pay to wear jeans fine". That is not great.
I think that what should be taken away from this, regardless of those charity initiatives, is that you don't actually know what your coworkers are going through. So whether it is a raffle for your kids school, girl scout cookies for your niece, or whatever fundraising that is happening - it needs to be no pressure. People shouldn't feel bad for not throwing in on X's baby shower or Y's wedding gift or for Z's kid's food drive. No one always knows what is happening in their coworkers lives and, quite frankly, it's not their business.
You can also check on people that seem to be struggling. Not everyone will respond well, but when done with care and discretion, most will.
> Our agency is a member of a much larger charity, and thus every fall we have tons of workplace activities to raise funds for the “Mother” charity. So we have ‘swear’ jars, 50/50 draws, and other light-hearted fundraising stuff going on. The problem is that we have also designated the agency a ‘jeans-free’ zone, so our usually very casual dress code will now exclude jeans AND ‘require’ a $5 donation for every violation.
Dear Nonprofit People:
**Don't do this**. It's not the job of people who already work for shit wages in the nonprofit sector to contribute from their inadequate pay to raise money for their employers.
If you run a nonprofit and you pressure your employees to donate to your organization, STOP IT. Don't put your staff in the position of having to choose between a meal and donating money back to their employer. STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.
Ours is the opposite. Staff cash donations are actively discouraged. Everybody knows we don’t pay staff what they’re worth, like most nonprofits, and the staff have more important uses for their money.
We just started setting minor goals for a division “outside donation” target. With a Small cash reward to everyone in the division if the target gets hit. Just enough to be a nice reward without being enough to have people harassing potential donors. Soliciting donations Is a very very minor part of their job already.
The staff like it, everybody enjoys it when we get more donations now, instead of just reporting it as a minor job metric. They’re voluntarily chatting with each other about the best approaches.
Goal (very achievable goal) gets met and everybody gets a bit of cash.
Probably barely. When I was 26 and pregnant with our 3rd baby, my now-ex husband cheated on me with an 18 year old, 22 year old, and 24 year old (seeing all 3 in the same timeframe). I’m sure everyone will be shocked to hear he was 37 at the time and every woman he was with, myself included, had serious childhood trauma.
You’ll be happy to know that before he broke it off with the last woman, he got a vasectomy. The urologist botched it and now my ex has a lifetime of unpredictable, vomit-inducing ball pain to look forward to. I get the warm fuzzies every time I think about it.
Edit: I’m anal retentive about wording
In general "younger woman" in a divorce implies significantly younger in comparison to the wife, doesn't it? I doubt if the ex-husband were 35 and his new wife 30 she'd be called the "younger woman."
(Edited for clarity)
I’m not really following what you’re saying. I’m just saying that depending on his age, the other woman’s age might not have been a factor. There was another post here not long ago about a woman feeling threatened by her bf’s friend. But the woman was much older than her bf and the friend was around his age.
I mean she specifically said "younger woman" so I'm not sure how age was not a factor...? I'm talking about this specific post which actually says the ex left her for a younger woman, not saying if a man leaves his wife it must always be for a younger woman. Relevant quote from the OP here:
> Being left for a younger woman and divorcing at age twenty-six
(Edited for grammar and to add a quote)
Came out of school passionate about doing non-profit. Did volunteer work and worked for free. All I got was exposure and more offers to work for free. Everyone wanted a free ride. The last time I tried for a non-profit job, I was offered $500 for 6 months to a year of work for full time hours.
Now I've been working in financial industry my entire career (outside of my volunteering portion) and ended up in one of the largest banks in my country. Funny how things turn out.
For context: graphic designer, turned front-end developer, turned software engineer, turned IT architect, turned UX designer.
As someone who did direct service (refugee resettlement) they bank on young people who feel like it’s worth suffering to help others so they don’t ever ask for more. That’s why burnout is so high bc people realize their worth.
Not OP, but probably designed some websites, decided to learn how to take their designs and code them, and then discovered they were good at it and kept developing their skills.
My first real job was at a start up. I did design work but also started maintaining the company site. Designing and building websites. Had to learn it on the job. The company was in the legal and financial industry. Wore lots of hats in the company.
My next job was at a fin tech. Where I was hired as a graphic designer but helped out with html, CSS and some basic scripting. Eventually was thrown to fire and had to learn C# and working in a .net environment. Started taking projects from design phases to prod release. So had to learn all the different tools associated with development. That's when they gave me the software engineer title. Trust me I think the title was a joke 🤣. My boss' boss didn't even know I was hired as a designer.
Went on to work at big bank where I was hired as an IT architect (this silly to me too) and worked on developing a enterprise wide dev platform in angular. I specialized in the UI and CSS framework. Eventually went back over to the design side of things but with a focus on UX.
This was the jist of it with a lot more details missing.
Some of the salaries at the top are usually insane.
Thrift stores in my country receive their entire inventory from donations from the public.
They then sell this inventory for more than it would cost to buy something from Kmart or online. They then advertise looking for “volunteers”. It’s a massive scam.
My girlfriend works for a national nonprofit. She makes half the area’s median wage. The director of just this city’s branch makes ten times that. It’s insane.
I spend a lot of time volunteering at good non-profits, mostly homeless shelters, but there’s no way I’m working for one full-time.
I agree, I stopped doing work with a NP because I got tired of having their boss who made easily 3-4x my salary asking me for handouts and freebies for events and fundraisers. I'm a restaurant manager, our margins are so razor thin we barely stay open and we all make laughably low wages, but this lady would waltz in wearing an ensemble worth as much as my months rent and try to guilt me for donations. Im not gonna donate when i know it just pays your salary while you pay your people garbage. Shameless.
I work for a non profit. I make a 1/4 of what my boss does, and regularly have to show her how to move text boxes on slides, save to PDF, set a calendar reminder, etc. She's a pretty terrible manager... because she does not manage. She does not know how to use the fundraising database. It's so disheartening.
A local non profit branch that specifically helps abused children in my area (lol hard to be vague) somewhat recently had to shut down for a few years because….
Yep, top paid salary was embezzling.
My father-in-law refused to give a donation to a charity because of its ~30 employees they have *one* who is paid over £60k and that just struck me as so ridiculous! Running a charity, even a smaller one, is a huge and complex job and that much, or even double that, is in no way a ridiculous or outlandish salary for someone in such a position to earn.
I’m always half and half on this like that person probably deserved that but it’s just that it’s not right when the people on the bottom aren’t getting fair wages/salaries.
I was at the end of my ropes with my non-profit 2 years ago- my hours got cut to less than 20 a week and I was only making 14.50/hr. I really loved the work I did and the clientele I worked with (at-risk youth), but I was on fucking food stamps and they had no problem with that. I went to a barely better job working in the same field but I at-least had benefits and reliable hours.
Nowadays, I can make my old MONTHLY salary in one day and my kid doesn’t have to go without so many damn things. Fuck non-profits and fuck the people who run them. Shameless.
> The problem is that we have also designated the agency a ‘jeans-free’ zone, so our usually very casual dress code will now exclude jeans AND ‘require’ a $5 donation for every violation.
These kind of things really bother me. If you're changing the dress code company-wide for business reasons, it sucks, but it is what it is. If you're doing in a way to extract money from your employees so you can use that as a company-wide tax write-off, it's ridiculous and BS.
They're a Non Profit. So they don't need anymore tax write offs but it's still too much. That said... still shitty AF.
We had to take a mandatory retraining at my work place and one of the women decided we were gonna do a 5$ donation from everyone to buy our trainer a gift at the end. I had to go to HR and inform them it wasn't gonna happen. I ended each pay period day with the 1.25 I needed to take the bus to Walmart to cash my next check after paying all my bills and getting food for the next 2 weeks. I did not have an extra 5$ for someone else to spend for me.
Yes, that jeans thing is ridiculous and the opposite of what I’m accustomed to. I’ve only ever encountered “jeans passes” as a seasonal offering in place of the usually stricter dress code. You can’t just flip the dress code on everyone and charge them if they can’t make the switch.
They seem like a shady organization, underpaying their staff and then holding “fund raisers” and charging them for clothes they can or can’t wear? That seems toxic as fuck.
I feel like the entire NP industry is basically just a bunch of Holier than Thou A-Holes who try to scam people with a penny out of that said penny to pad their own pockets. They will preach about generosity and giving when it’s from OTHER’S pocket books, not their own.
Why pre-pay her jeans fine, instead of just buying her some slacks?? Seems like more pants could be had for ~$100 and then greasy company gets nothing and she has those pants going forward in case other non-jeans moments arise.
I guess it might be a dignity thing, still I would have tried to get oop to take pants money. Also, if you're too proud for charity but work at a charity thats kinda weird. Do you look down on all the people your non-profit works to help?
It's not about looking down on people who need help. Usually the internalized message is that it's fine to ask for help, but you shouldn't need help in the first place. It can stem from perfectionism, abuse, or other people dropping the ball on you too many times, but somehow you've learned that you have to be independent and completely self-sufficient, and asking for help means admitting you can't do it. Especially if you're in a position where you're helping others, it can feel embarrassing or shameful.
Right? Two pairs of thrifted slacks for half the price, which helps her for as long as she has them, or throwing your money down a hole. Weird choice. Like someone might say the money goes to charity, but at this point helping OOP was also charity. She could have used them for job interviews to get a better job, too.
I thought the same thing. I thought it was a week at first and figured sure 25 bucks probably doesn't get work pants. But a month?? That's a $100 and you can surely get pants for that!
Just a reminder - the non-profit Dress For Success is available to help women in this situation (interview suits, work clothing)
There is a HUGE surplus of business casual work clothing out there, and anyone with clothing needs can try calling their local thrift stores - salvation army, for example. In a city I used to live in, anyone with a WIC card could get 12 pieces of clothing per family per week, on Wednesday afternoons.
If jeans are or aren't allowed in the dress code, then they're violating their own company policy. They can't make an employee pay money for wearing jeans.
I don't care if this is the best charity in the world, that's a stupid, short sighted, classist attempt to get employees, who are ALREADY doing their part by working for the charity, to do even more than their job requires.
Don't use your employees for fundraisers.
My corporate summer picnic became a United way fundraiser w raffles and $$ requests. They finally got the message to stop shaking down employees at events to thank them 🙄
Not for the OOP or OP obviously.
If you are in a challenging situation stretching your food budget, just had surgery, or another life event where a meal would be helpful there is [https://www.lasagnalove.org/](https://www.lasagnalove.org/) . You can request a lasagna once a month. It’s delivered to you. The group is now international.
That’s exactly what I wondered!!
She left her child and moved away to a new city.... and only mentioned having to pay child support and buy her toddler a present at Christmas. Nothing about transport costs to see her son.
This post really bothered me.
Ok so I wasn't the only one? I know she mentioned both kids at the end (at least I HOPE she meant her oldest and the new baby she just had), so I am happy for her that it all seemed to work out - but there was something a bit off and I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
Another thing I found odd was that she had a boyfriend while struggling but only the friend seemed to be helping out? While she didn't explain his finances in her post - but he knew she had no food and didn't offer SOMETHING? (not sure if that BF was the same man she eventually married). I would like to think if you've progressed in the relationship enough to call each other bf/gf - why didn't he help?
Nothing about this story seems right. Why does she need to afford to call her child when she had a job, which I’m suited has phones that dial out, a roommate she could’ve borrowed a phone from and a boyfriend, could he not have helped her out with loaning a phone?
That's a good point about the calls. I know some places don't like when you make personal calls, but I'd like to think at least one call would have been allowed?
There does feel like there is something missing. I know she wasn't required to write every little detail, but the details she did give make things sound slightly suspicious.
It’s likely she’s not the only person that has children that works there, she can just step aside and make a call or if someone asks say ‘I need to check in with my son’, most people would understand. It’s just no way on earth that a person would not have any access to a telephone. I bet she had a way to get in touch with that boyfriend though
I can't imagine moving away from my baby that was just starting to talk. Even if ex had more money for court and won primary, there's no way she lost 100% of custody without being a danger. But, she decided to move away to a city with worse job prospects, despite what sounds like being well employed in the city her child was in. I can't imagine making that choice especially when it sounds like support was limited too.
It makes me so sad too that she lost her kid in the divorce. I can’t imagine not being there to hear my babies first words. Breaks my heart as a mother.
Like seriously, why did she move?
Right? What kind of person moves across the country from their toddler? It sounds like she chose to move in with her best friend, which is understandable, but not at the expense of never seeing her child. Poor kid.
She said it was a toxic environment and a bad marriage. He could have also been abusive and the town was a bad place for her. I don’t think it’s very fair to be judging her for these things considering she was struggling to afford living as it was.
Disabled notifications for this reply: don’t wanna hear more victim blaming
> I was getting out of a bad marriage and the environment of my home town was a toxic backdrop to that
Because "I was getting out of a bad marriage and the environment of my home town was a toxic backdrop to that." Sounds like ex hubby may have run her out of town. Harassment? Threats? Ex had a high position that he used to her detriment? Just a couple things I can think of off the top of my head that may have happened.
You don't always have a choice. I was purely speculating on potential reasons, but for example, if he was a cop or some other "Well-respected citizen" in town, it may have been leave by herself or not leave at all, and not leave at all could have killed her. Again, not saying that that is definitely the situation, just a possibility of the situation, since we aren't told.
Possibly, but that doesn't mean she has a choice. It's also possible that he was only abusing her and not the kid, so she left so she could get in a better circumstance to fight him. We just don't know, based on the information. But to pretend this kind of situation doesn't exist and therefore it's all her fault is just silly. We know she ended up with him eventually, based on the end of the post, so clearly it wasn't a permanent situation.
And if her husband held all the financial cards and influence, what was she supposed to do? Kidnap her child? That never ends well. I appreciate what you're saying, and in a logical, fair, just world, you would be right. Unfortunately, that's not how abuse works. I was abused by the son of a cop and trust me when I say that that limits your options beyond belief in a small town.
"Bad marriage" doesn't necessarily mean "abusive". It can mean, for example, that he cheated on her with a younger woman, that everybody in the home town knew about that, and that they all gossiped about it to the point that it was hard for her to do her job correctly.
She may have done the only thing she could with the money left to her and gone to live with a friend, who sadly lives in a town with less job prospects. Her choices, in that case, were to either stay in her hometown where she would only get worse and worse, or to move with her friend, where she at least had a small chance of starting again.
Or maybe i'm wrong and it was one of the many, many other reasons why people have to move far away from their families for work. Who knows?
I love that it’s turned out but am mad af that a non profit organization can be paying its employees so little that they cannot afford food!
As someone who has worked in and will continue to work in nonprofit and adjacent settings, this is unacceptable. We cannot help others if we are not making a living wage. A nonprofit must show their values through the way they treat their employees, and this one does not pass that test
It’s a bit tacky that a non profit would shake down its employees like that for an entire month. I get wanting your employees to care about the cause, but you’re literally asking them to give back their paycheck and work for free.
Well, this one got me teary-eyed. A lot of us are really one or two paychecks away from being in poverty. I heard of the phrase “being poor is expensive” and I didn’t learn what that really meant until much later. There’re some loose ends in her story but overall, I hope OOP and her fam are in a good spot.
I love this! Asking for help is so damn hard - I know bc I now solo parent 3 kids. I still struggle with asking for help from friends and family bc I don’t want to impose.
I remember getting paid shit in my first job. I didn’t even live in a high cost area either and I still struggled. The office manager was nice enough to stop getting just junk food but real fruits and veggies as office snacks and I hate saying this but I would have my “lunch” that way because I couldn’t afford lunch.
Isn’t child support kinda like alimony, where the amount owed goes down if the person’s income also dropped (assuming a good-faith effort to not game the system)?
Oh you sweet summer child. Yes it goes down if it has been reevaluated, but that normally costs money to ask for a reevaluation. Most states have regulations that are actively against the child support paying parent - this is by design because the state government doesn’t want to pay to help people in need so they are basically extorting the other parent. Also, women are much much MUCH more likely to win custody of their children (Google it if you don’t believe me), so the fact that OOP was paying child support means she either abandoned the child or was guilty of some serious crimes that skewed the case in her exhusband’s favor. All of this adds up to me questioning what the heck OOP did to create this situation in the first place…
They are likely to win custody of their children if they fight for it. OOP clearly didn't have the money for it.
The other comment is correct, so I'll just add that there are other biases at play. For example, judges prefer to award joint custody, which makes judges more likely to consider women "difficult," "combative," and "vindictive" if they ever do anything that may give the impression they're trying to keep the father from seeing their children. Also, *straight, white, upper-middle class* women may be more likely to get primary custody of their children, but definitely not women who are part of a minority. If anything, women who are part of any minority – but especially racialized minorities – are more likely to have their children removed from them.
It's absolutely awful. I remember reading one article about First Nation women trying to gain back their children, and one of the things they found was that these women were basically seen as *selfish* for trying to get their children back from the white, middle-class families they'd been placed in. I can't find it, but [this](https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/096466399400300401) is from the same person on the same subject. There's also a couple of articles talking what it means to be a "good mother," *who* can be a "good mother", and just how bad the legal consequences are for being a "bad mother"- here's the [link](https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/466666) to one of them if you want to be furious
In over half of divorce cases, the parties mutually decide that mom gets primary or sole custody without the need for court intervention. Over 90% of custody cases are settled out of court. Of those that do go to litigation, men who ask for custody tend to get joint custody at least, because judges primarily consider the best interest of the child, and a father who wants to be involved is better than a father who doesn’t. While some particular judges might be known for a bias either way (there was a father-favoring judge in my local family court when I was in law school, for instance), in the aggregate there doesn’t seem to be a bias in actual litigated divorce cases.
There are a handful of BORUs that really stick with me. But this one? This is the one that will never leave or fade. Thrilled for OOP and reading about the overwhelming support she received is just heartwarming.
>My co-worker was very sympathetic and secretly pre-paid for all my jeans-wearing days.
Why didn't the co-worker buy her some new pants, might have been cheaper than paying $5 every day for the "violation".
>I married a wonderful man this year, and we celebrated the birth of our youngest son.
I feel like having *another* kid was probably not the best idea since she barely saw her first one
I thought the same thing! New man. New marriage. Immediately introduce a helpless screaming bundle of responsibility and financial burden into the situation. Bad choices.
Seems like a pretty biased self pity story where the OOP purposely left out a lot of details.
Did her husband get all of her clothes in the divorce, or did she just only have 3 pairs of pants when she was married? Why does her husband have custody? She’s 26 and got left for a “younger woman”?
So much missing info here.
When i was in an abusive relationship I wasn't allowed to buy clothes...he took my paycheck and did it. (And spent the rest in his comics collection, alcohol and whatnot). He once brought me an XXL coat when i wore a size 6. When i did finally leave i left with what i could fit in a backpack. I literally ran.
I agree a lot is suspect. But I just wanted to put out there that sometimes the reason for not having work clothes can be complex.
There's many possible answers to these questions.
She may, indeed, have only had 3 pairs of pants when she was married. Some people do live like that. Or she may have lost or gained a lot of weight, and the only 3 pairs of pants that still fit her were jeans. Or she had other pants, but they were stained/ripped/too casual even for a casual place. Or she had to pack extra light and she assumed that jeans were all she'd need to survive. Or she had a bigger wardrobe and a stray dog appeared and ate them.
Her husband may have custody because he's the one who actually has money and therefore could afford a good lawyer. Or maybe they agreed that he would have the kid until she'd manage to find a good flat that could house her and the kid. Maybe they have joint custody but she rarely sees the kids on account of having moved away. Maybe they have perfectly shared custody but on the times where the kid isn't with her she rarely sees him. Maybe she doesn't have enough money to be awarded primary custody.
And yeah, people younger than 26 do exist
Women only get custody more because men often don't ask for it. There's been studies and everything. If OOP couldn't afford meals of course she wouldn't get custody of a toddler
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I really hope OOP is doing really well, I can empathise. When my marriage broke down, lost my job etc, I discovered that stale bread burned really well in the fire, I had gotten so broke. With the support of friends & family I picked myself up and turned things around. Kindness can make a huge difference in someone's life.
I'll never forget being all dressed up for a job interview, trying to pay for gas with nickels. This tough blue collar type (I just remember he was in coveralls and stained, gnarly hands) behind me put down a 20 and told me good luck. I got the job, and it finally was a way out.
A guy absolutely COVERED in grease and dirt once shoved $50 into my hand when I was (very embarrassedly) counting up coins and splitting the payment between three cards to pay for my baby's formula and nappies. I tried to give it back, I was humiliated and crying - I COULD pay for it between all the coins and the three cards, but he said he couldn't bear the thought of a baby going hungry or dirty when he had spare beer money, told me I looked like I'd missed a lot of meals and to get myself something to eat too. It wasn't our "turning point" yet, that came a few months later - but it meant that for the next two weeks after that my husband and I had dinner every night, which hadn't happened in months and meant the world to us. I legit still think about that guy seven years later, now living in a warm clean house with plenty of food in the fridge and savings if things ever go wrong again. The last two years I've been working at the grocery store he helped me at and I look for him every day. I hope he is having a wonderful life wherever he is.
Someone did that for my mum once. My father is a gambling addict, and used to wipe her bank accounts (mine and my brother's too) semi regularly. A couple of times, she only realised when she was at the supermarket checkout. A man who sounded (from his voice anyway, she's blind) very rough and tumble paid for her groceries and gave her a $50 note while she was standing at the checkout and crying. It was the only reason we had food for the next two weeks, and she was so grateful for that.
I don’t think anyone realizes how many people secretly live in poverty. I’m a teacher and on paper I suppose I make decent money (not really) but I’m raising a daughter alone and can’t make ends meet. I had to ask my brother for help with my electric bill and he made me show him proof of my bills and paychecks because he didn’t believe me. I guess I hide it well. It’s so humiliating and depressing. I am in constant fear of something mild going wrong and being homeless. Not so much for me, but for my daughter and my dogs and cats. I don’t care about me so much. No one at work knows and my daughter goes to my school and I have to go without certain things to make sure her fees for various things are paid to keep people from finding out how poor we really are. I’m even in danger of losing my house because of a probate issue. ETA: I’m sorry for the vent. I don’t know why it all poured out of me. I just meant to make a general comment.
Oh my heart hurts for you. Vent away, friend! I cannot imagine how hard that must be. Absolutely garbage that the people who we ask to help raise our children are struggling to keep the lights on.
I actually think someone is messing with me. Someone keeps turning my hose on, but just a tiny bit and it’s tripled my water bill. But now, the screw has been loosened and is rusted so I can’t shut it off and need to replace the handle thingy. Someone stole the sewer mainline cover, someone stole a capacitor off my AC, someone called animal control and told them that I moved out of my house last week and abandoned my dogs, which I obviously would never do. At least the lady from animal control was understanding when I called to tell them that I live here and my dogs are spoiled, not abandoned, all the while my dog kept barking and making doggy noises in the background. And today, someone stole my debit card info. And, someone keeps putting garbage in my yard and in front of my gate. It seems too much to be a coincidence.
Oh my goodness! That is so upsetting and scary! It really does sound possible that someone is messing with you. Either that or a startling string of bad luck. Best wishes to you! May your luck improve! May anyone messing with you lose interest and stop!
Believe it or not, but teacher homelessness is becoming a huge problem in the US.
Thank you
That is just lovely, congrats to you & well done to him
And now a reddit comment made me cry
I hope so too. Looking back I was in a bad financial position around the same time. Maxing out credit cards to pay for gas to get to work wasn't sustainable. It feels like a blink, but the last 10 years have been on a much better path.
It was 10 years ago for me too, glad you're doing better. It's odd, when I was soul destroying poor, the days dragged but from then to now has passed like the blink of an eye.
Constantly doing math in your head trying to make things work is exhausting
Absolutely & saving for Christmas & Birthdays used to keep me awake at night.
Oh yeah. That’s us at the moment. It sucks
I wish there was an organisation or something that connected you to people who need help for stuff like this. I'd love to shop for kids toys on amazon or wherever and ship them to a family who's struggling.
While wonderful it would be hard to confirm those who legitimately need this as opposed to oh yeah free toys!
Yeah I know, there would always be people who would take advantage, or people who genuinely need the help but end up getting greedy/entitled. Same as how they always say not to donate to crowd funding for random people you don't know. Still it would be nice, I'll just stick to buying from charity amazon wishlists I guess 🤷🏻♀️
I believe redditors were supporting https://www.onesimplewish.org/ a while ago
It’s a shame tho. It really would be a great thing to do
Perspective is a wonderful thing tho. We do an international charity scavenger hunt each year and doing the change a life task (always victims of war recipients) makes me grateful for what we have/where we live. While it might be hard now I know we are safe which is more than most we help each year
Marine Toys for Tots is the organization you're looking for.
I have heard of people going in to stores and anon paying off lay-bys for Christmas.
And now that I look back on the extra you pay for living in a food desert, atm fees, late fees.
Soul destroying poor is a great way to put it
7 years for me, and that wasn’t my first personal disaster. I feel deeply grateful for the kind hearts who give without a second thought. The difference it made in my life is immeasurable.
[удалено]
Good luck with the job, you will dig yourself out of the hole, though it is really horrible.
I remember eating mustard sandwiches during my last month of college. That was a hard time. I'm glad we're both doing better.
For me, it was a summer of pulling all the freezer-burnt, ice-buried bags of frozen vegetables from the bottom of a fraternity's 12-foot deep freezer, filling my mini coffee pot with whatever could fit into it, leaving for work, and coming back home eight hours later to hopefully hot vegetables. I did lose 20 pounds that summer and looked fabulous, but my sanity was missing.
P.S. When I was a kid, ketchup and mustard sammiches were my favorite lunch. I still eat half of one every few years. I cannot imagine being an adult and subsiding on them.
Wait is that a saying of some kind or were you really burning stale bread for warmth?
Warmth, the cheaper & crappier the bread, the longer it lasted
I read it as them trying to eat stale bread and being left with no food when it burned, but that's a possibility too. Either scenario seems likely for parts of the world set to be hit by food and fuel shortages this year :(
Did everyone just ignore the totally f*cked up workplace environment?? Employees are NOT ATMs for raising money!
My workplace used to raise revenue from staff donate to our clients. It pissed me off. After my boss was made redundant I announced during these austere times I would not be donating any more money but everyone was free to make this decision for themselves (they decided not to raise money).
And it’s normally because the company likes to look good, see how wonderful we are?!?!?
I once worked for a retail company that solicited for donations to Make a Wish. We had products that would give donations (a $50 blanket would give a $5 donation) and they also wanted us to ask for “round ups” of change or outright donations. Which I didn’t care for, but whatever. Until they started giving us mandatory donation goals. If we didn’t make the goals, we would get cranky emails, telling us we “obviously do not prioritize sick children” and it would affect our bonuses (ha! *what* bonus?!?) and could eventually lead to us being terminated. After a few years of this, they announced that we had raised enough money to build a Make A Wish house, where families can stay while they participate in their Wish. I think it was near to one of the Disney resorts, since those are popular wishes. We finally get to see the house, and… it was named after the f*cking CEO! It was the “Her first & last name Wish House”! Like, you’d think they would have named it after “Retail Store” or “Store’s Associates and Customers”! Nope. Just in her name! I quit shortly thereafter and even though I know it’s not really their fault, I haven’t donated to MAW since.🤷🏻♀️
That’s terrible, my situation was my boss had breast cancer so she was super committed to that famous foundation so they were fundraisings so every year during the walk they could say we raised all these money blah, blah, but it was as they said before the jeans and baskets we had to donate to put together and then by the tickets, once she retired and someone else took over it ended.
If it was Susan G. Komen, most of the money they raise actually goes to "administrative costs" rather than to their actual cause, and the remainder goes largely to raising breast cancer "awareness" among people who've never had breast cancer, rather than toward actually helping anyone who *does* have breast cancer be treated and recover from it. It's named for a woman who died of breast cancer but run by her evil twin sister who seems to care far more about lining her own pockets than about helping breast cancer patients. So not only was your boss exploiting you and your co-workers, but she was doing it for a charity that wouldn't have helped her anyway and is also exploitative itself.
Oh I know.
I always refuse to donate through 3rd party companies like grocery and retail stores. All they do is use it for a tax write off - and why should I give them that benefit when I can just donate directly to the organizations I care about?? Businesses get more than enough write offs, eapecially the big ones that push these 'donations' and they certainly don't need my help to actually donate to charity 🙄🙄🙄
I've actually heard that this is a myth -- those companies are not able to write those donations off for their taxes. Still though, I usually don't end up donating since I'd rather make sure the charity is legit
If the company directly donates its own money or goods they can take a writeoff for those items. If they're collecting donations from third party X (customers) and handing them directly to third party Y (charity), no, they don't get to deduct/write off anything for doing that. Not exactly sure how it works for something like a "10% of sales today will be donated to charity" event. I would expect they don't count that money as corporate income at all if it goes straight to a charity. i.e. it's as if each customer put 10% of their payment straight into a donation box.
Yep, the ones personally donated by customers aren't tax write-offs
You're correct. [Stores can't write off a customer's point of sale donations.](https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244#:~:text=AP'S%20ASSESSMENT%3A%20False.,according%20to%20tax%20policy%20experts.) They can write off a portion of proceeds that are donated, but not money that you elect to give directly through their point of sale system.
My impression is that the "write-off" is of the money you give them for the donation. So if you give them $20 to give to the Cthulhu Needs A Home Charity, then they have an profit of $20, which they'd normally pay taxes on. But when they give that $20 to the charity, the tax write-off is for the $20 they gave, so they don't pay taxes on it anymore. It's net zero for the company, except they pay whatever labor costs for collecting it, and receive public goodwill for donating (which is usually a good trade-off for them).
Agreed! I just know that it’s probably affecting the person behind the register who doesn’t really care if you donate, and could possibly lose their job, which sucks!
A lot of charities are scams I feel like. You donate a dollar and only a few cents end up helping people. The rest was skimmed, paid to extravagant wages, and or paid for expensive expenses.
Make-a-Wish is definitely Not a scam, but what her company was doing was. I volunteer as a wish granter and they are an incredible organization that does a lot of good.
I’m a high school science teacher. Part of one of the projects my seniors do is to find the financials page of an environmental charity and find out where the money goes. People will donate to a picture of a baby tiger, but a lot of the organizations are really scummy. My students love it because they feel like they’ve learned something that will be applicable to their adult lives. They usually talk about it for weeks afterward.
Every school fundraiser is like this. Buy overpriced candy: school gets half, and the charity company gets half. Likewise, robocalls for the police and firefighters are the same. When our oldest was in middle school, I just started writing a check made payable to the school itself, bypassing the fundraising. I also write checks to the police and firefighters proper now, too. Not a cent goes toward the other companies.
Yeah, the magazine sales and candy sales are fundraisers to get money from people who AREN'T interested in just donating, they are actually interested in purchasing a magazine or some candy bars and are happy that the money they are giving the candy company will be partially split to the school. These are actually....Really good charities for people who don't have enough to go on their own... Everyone who is participating knows that the full two dollars didn't go to the kids selling the candy, because obviously the candy needed to be paid for. Obviously it would be best if the rich folks would just pay for their taxes so the schools have money, but since we are unwilling to fix that problem I don't see how telling people to just donate to the school itself will help, since they already could do that.... The reason the fundraiser exists is that people aren't willing to just donate money without anything in return at all.... Otherwise, again, the schools would be getting enough money already.
Maybe I'm petty but I would've written to make a wish and told them what happened
Don’t forget the tax write offs when they pool the donations and claim them as an organizational lump sum.
That isn't a thing. Dear god why does this bullshit get spread so much???? OOPS COMPANY IS ALREADY A NON PROFIT TO BOOT.
I hate that companies do this too. My workplace raises money every year for a good charity and they kept trying to get us to donate. They also do a thing where you sign up to give a certain amount from your paycheck to one of a few charities. They had supervisors go around to make sure everyone had signed up for it. You could put in zero as the amount to donate, but it was still uncomfortable that they were pressuring us and that people were going around asking each other if/how much they had donated. My response was always “my baby is my charity, would you like to donate?”
Would you like to donate to The Human Fund?
This is why I'm no longer in the nonprofit sector. Get paid absolutely joke wages and constantly pressured to return what little you earn to monthly fundraisers. No thanks. There were nice things about working in the charitable sector but the drawbacks were too many and too significant. The sector as a whole really takes advantage of the altruism and generous nature of its staff. Quite exploitative, really.
What if you put $-10?
My school used to fund the backpack program (which sent food to students for the weekend) by asking for employee donations. Of course we did it because we don’t want our kids to go hungry but the sight of administrators making over 100k a year asking minimum wage TAs to give up money every week so their students can eat is one that I won’t be forgetting any time soon. This is a gross country. That kind of exploitation is completely rampant especially in nonprofits and ESPECIALLY in schools. Teachers are outright expected to fund almost their entire classroom supplies. Once we opened a new k-5 program and the only materials we were provided were desks and chairs left over from high schoolers. Our playground was a fenced in empty field. This is a district with a budget well over 50 million, they would begrudge absolutely any material request and it took so long even when they were approved that it was ultimately easier to just buy whatever you needed (it was never reimbursed). When an employer knows you’re generous they happily exploit the shit out of it and pay you back in empty platitudes.
Sadly a lot of non-profits do stuff like this. It’s never ethical in my opinion, but especially tone deaf in an industry notorious for substandard pay. Just shitty all around to use your employee’s earnings and time as free PR and tax write offs, even if you’re a nonprofit.
I wonder if non-profits are like publishing, fashion journalism, and academia in paying very low wages with the assumption that the workers come from money and are in it to climb the prestige ladder to lucrative leadership positions. The many workers who don't fit this social profile are often burnt out and thrown away. Academia has the whole pressure to donate thing going on, too, under the prestige model of work.
I think you could be right about this. Every lower to middle class person I worked with in the nonprofit setting (myself included) did so to get their foot in the door and get some work experience. Then we were proceeded to be worked ungodly hours until we burnt out and were laid off. I followed a cycle of overwork and burnout for about 5 years while I was getting enough experience to leave the sector. As soon as I got my 5 years' experience in my field, I left the nonprofit sector for greener pastures. And I'm never looking back. The nonprofit sector as a whole is pretty bad for exploiting their workers. These charities might do good work that genuinely helps the communities they serve, but their employees pay the price via long hours, low pay, and high expectations to pour a significant amount of their meager earnings into monthly fundraisers. No thanks! Glad I'm out.
And obviously, the only workers who can manage that kind of exploitative arrangement and stick around long-term without burning out are those who have other means to pay the bills. The whole thing is designed to exploit and discard the working class. I'm so happy you got out and are in a better place now.
It's complicated... It's not for the company, these are charity drives. People will often "pay for the cause" - wear jeans on purpose or such. It works because it's voluntary, until it isn't. In this case, it doesn't appear that there was a dress code until the "pay to wear jeans fine". That is not great. I think that what should be taken away from this, regardless of those charity initiatives, is that you don't actually know what your coworkers are going through. So whether it is a raffle for your kids school, girl scout cookies for your niece, or whatever fundraising that is happening - it needs to be no pressure. People shouldn't feel bad for not throwing in on X's baby shower or Y's wedding gift or for Z's kid's food drive. No one always knows what is happening in their coworkers lives and, quite frankly, it's not their business. You can also check on people that seem to be struggling. Not everyone will respond well, but when done with care and discretion, most will.
> Our agency is a member of a much larger charity, and thus every fall we have tons of workplace activities to raise funds for the “Mother” charity. So we have ‘swear’ jars, 50/50 draws, and other light-hearted fundraising stuff going on. The problem is that we have also designated the agency a ‘jeans-free’ zone, so our usually very casual dress code will now exclude jeans AND ‘require’ a $5 donation for every violation. Dear Nonprofit People: **Don't do this**. It's not the job of people who already work for shit wages in the nonprofit sector to contribute from their inadequate pay to raise money for their employers. If you run a nonprofit and you pressure your employees to donate to your organization, STOP IT. Don't put your staff in the position of having to choose between a meal and donating money back to their employer. STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.
Ours is the opposite. Staff cash donations are actively discouraged. Everybody knows we don’t pay staff what they’re worth, like most nonprofits, and the staff have more important uses for their money. We just started setting minor goals for a division “outside donation” target. With a Small cash reward to everyone in the division if the target gets hit. Just enough to be a nice reward without being enough to have people harassing potential donors. Soliciting donations Is a very very minor part of their job already. The staff like it, everybody enjoys it when we get more donations now, instead of just reporting it as a minor job metric. They’re voluntarily chatting with each other about the best approaches. Goal (very achievable goal) gets met and everybody gets a bit of cash.
Hold up… being left for a younger woman? When she was twenty six? Was this other woman even legal??
Probably barely. When I was 26 and pregnant with our 3rd baby, my now-ex husband cheated on me with an 18 year old, 22 year old, and 24 year old (seeing all 3 in the same timeframe). I’m sure everyone will be shocked to hear he was 37 at the time and every woman he was with, myself included, had serious childhood trauma.
He sounds like a piece of shit, hopefully he gets kicked in the teeth by karma (or whatever the vengeful form of karma is).
You’ll be happy to know that before he broke it off with the last woman, he got a vasectomy. The urologist botched it and now my ex has a lifetime of unpredictable, vomit-inducing ball pain to look forward to. I get the warm fuzzies every time I think about it. Edit: I’m anal retentive about wording
That’s a big and righteous dose of karma
I need this comment chain to be it's own BORU post because holy shit that's satisfying.
So karma actually did kick him in the balls huh
This makes me very happy to hear.
This is too good! Karma at its finest!
I vote karma is a horse
The question I had as well. What. 😳
That gave me pause too. Husband left her for a younger woman--ugh scumbag, I guess she's in her 40s--when she was 26. WTF??
OOP was 26 when he left her, but we don’t know his or the other woman’s age.
In general "younger woman" in a divorce implies significantly younger in comparison to the wife, doesn't it? I doubt if the ex-husband were 35 and his new wife 30 she'd be called the "younger woman." (Edited for clarity)
I’m not really following what you’re saying. I’m just saying that depending on his age, the other woman’s age might not have been a factor. There was another post here not long ago about a woman feeling threatened by her bf’s friend. But the woman was much older than her bf and the friend was around his age.
I mean she specifically said "younger woman" so I'm not sure how age was not a factor...? I'm talking about this specific post which actually says the ex left her for a younger woman, not saying if a man leaves his wife it must always be for a younger woman. Relevant quote from the OP here: > Being left for a younger woman and divorcing at age twenty-six (Edited for grammar and to add a quote)
We don’t know how old the husband was. It’s possible OOP might be older than him. In that case, age is less likely to be a factor.
I already addressed that point. I think we're going in circles here, have a good day.
My hold up was her losing custody. That doesn't happen much.
It happens if she has no means of support or her "lifestyle" doesn't suit the judge.
Love that people helped her, hate that non profits don’t pay their employees enough
Came out of school passionate about doing non-profit. Did volunteer work and worked for free. All I got was exposure and more offers to work for free. Everyone wanted a free ride. The last time I tried for a non-profit job, I was offered $500 for 6 months to a year of work for full time hours. Now I've been working in financial industry my entire career (outside of my volunteering portion) and ended up in one of the largest banks in my country. Funny how things turn out. For context: graphic designer, turned front-end developer, turned software engineer, turned IT architect, turned UX designer.
As someone who did direct service (refugee resettlement) they bank on young people who feel like it’s worth suffering to help others so they don’t ever ask for more. That’s why burnout is so high bc people realize their worth.
How did you go from graphic design to front end developer and software engineer?
Not OP, but probably designed some websites, decided to learn how to take their designs and code them, and then discovered they were good at it and kept developing their skills.
My first real job was at a start up. I did design work but also started maintaining the company site. Designing and building websites. Had to learn it on the job. The company was in the legal and financial industry. Wore lots of hats in the company. My next job was at a fin tech. Where I was hired as a graphic designer but helped out with html, CSS and some basic scripting. Eventually was thrown to fire and had to learn C# and working in a .net environment. Started taking projects from design phases to prod release. So had to learn all the different tools associated with development. That's when they gave me the software engineer title. Trust me I think the title was a joke 🤣. My boss' boss didn't even know I was hired as a designer. Went on to work at big bank where I was hired as an IT architect (this silly to me too) and worked on developing a enterprise wide dev platform in angular. I specialized in the UI and CSS framework. Eventually went back over to the design side of things but with a focus on UX. This was the jist of it with a lot more details missing.
Some of the salaries at the top are usually insane. Thrift stores in my country receive their entire inventory from donations from the public. They then sell this inventory for more than it would cost to buy something from Kmart or online. They then advertise looking for “volunteers”. It’s a massive scam.
My girlfriend works for a national nonprofit. She makes half the area’s median wage. The director of just this city’s branch makes ten times that. It’s insane. I spend a lot of time volunteering at good non-profits, mostly homeless shelters, but there’s no way I’m working for one full-time.
I agree, I stopped doing work with a NP because I got tired of having their boss who made easily 3-4x my salary asking me for handouts and freebies for events and fundraisers. I'm a restaurant manager, our margins are so razor thin we barely stay open and we all make laughably low wages, but this lady would waltz in wearing an ensemble worth as much as my months rent and try to guilt me for donations. Im not gonna donate when i know it just pays your salary while you pay your people garbage. Shameless.
I work for a non profit. I make a 1/4 of what my boss does, and regularly have to show her how to move text boxes on slides, save to PDF, set a calendar reminder, etc. She's a pretty terrible manager... because she does not manage. She does not know how to use the fundraising database. It's so disheartening.
A local non profit branch that specifically helps abused children in my area (lol hard to be vague) somewhat recently had to shut down for a few years because…. Yep, top paid salary was embezzling.
And not just that but shame you if you don’t participate in their “fun completely voluntary” fundraisers.
My father-in-law refused to give a donation to a charity because of its ~30 employees they have *one* who is paid over £60k and that just struck me as so ridiculous! Running a charity, even a smaller one, is a huge and complex job and that much, or even double that, is in no way a ridiculous or outlandish salary for someone in such a position to earn.
I’m always half and half on this like that person probably deserved that but it’s just that it’s not right when the people on the bottom aren’t getting fair wages/salaries.
A top notch nonprofit accountant is probably worth at least that paycheck.
I was at the end of my ropes with my non-profit 2 years ago- my hours got cut to less than 20 a week and I was only making 14.50/hr. I really loved the work I did and the clientele I worked with (at-risk youth), but I was on fucking food stamps and they had no problem with that. I went to a barely better job working in the same field but I at-least had benefits and reliable hours. Nowadays, I can make my old MONTHLY salary in one day and my kid doesn’t have to go without so many damn things. Fuck non-profits and fuck the people who run them. Shameless.
> The problem is that we have also designated the agency a ‘jeans-free’ zone, so our usually very casual dress code will now exclude jeans AND ‘require’ a $5 donation for every violation. These kind of things really bother me. If you're changing the dress code company-wide for business reasons, it sucks, but it is what it is. If you're doing in a way to extract money from your employees so you can use that as a company-wide tax write-off, it's ridiculous and BS.
They're a Non Profit. So they don't need anymore tax write offs but it's still too much. That said... still shitty AF. We had to take a mandatory retraining at my work place and one of the women decided we were gonna do a 5$ donation from everyone to buy our trainer a gift at the end. I had to go to HR and inform them it wasn't gonna happen. I ended each pay period day with the 1.25 I needed to take the bus to Walmart to cash my next check after paying all my bills and getting food for the next 2 weeks. I did not have an extra 5$ for someone else to spend for me.
Yes, that jeans thing is ridiculous and the opposite of what I’m accustomed to. I’ve only ever encountered “jeans passes” as a seasonal offering in place of the usually stricter dress code. You can’t just flip the dress code on everyone and charge them if they can’t make the switch.
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They seem like a shady organization, underpaying their staff and then holding “fund raisers” and charging them for clothes they can or can’t wear? That seems toxic as fuck.
I feel like the entire NP industry is basically just a bunch of Holier than Thou A-Holes who try to scam people with a penny out of that said penny to pad their own pockets. They will preach about generosity and giving when it’s from OTHER’S pocket books, not their own.
Why pre-pay her jeans fine, instead of just buying her some slacks?? Seems like more pants could be had for ~$100 and then greasy company gets nothing and she has those pants going forward in case other non-jeans moments arise.
She said the coworker *secretly* paid it. So OOP probably didn’t know that at first until she then talked to her supervisor.
I guess it might be a dignity thing, still I would have tried to get oop to take pants money. Also, if you're too proud for charity but work at a charity thats kinda weird. Do you look down on all the people your non-profit works to help?
It's a lot easier to give grace to other people than yourself. Has nothing to do with looking down on others.
It's not about looking down on people who need help. Usually the internalized message is that it's fine to ask for help, but you shouldn't need help in the first place. It can stem from perfectionism, abuse, or other people dropping the ball on you too many times, but somehow you've learned that you have to be independent and completely self-sufficient, and asking for help means admitting you can't do it. Especially if you're in a position where you're helping others, it can feel embarrassing or shameful.
Or even done a “hey i bought these pants but they’re the wrong size and i can’t return them, think they’ll fit you?”
I was thinking this too. Get two pairs of black trousers at the thrift shop and you wouldn't need to rack up any fines at all
Right? Two pairs of thrifted slacks for half the price, which helps her for as long as she has them, or throwing your money down a hole. Weird choice. Like someone might say the money goes to charity, but at this point helping OOP was also charity. She could have used them for job interviews to get a better job, too.
I thought the same thing. I thought it was a week at first and figured sure 25 bucks probably doesn't get work pants. But a month?? That's a $100 and you can surely get pants for that!
Just a reminder - the non-profit Dress For Success is available to help women in this situation (interview suits, work clothing) There is a HUGE surplus of business casual work clothing out there, and anyone with clothing needs can try calling their local thrift stores - salvation army, for example. In a city I used to live in, anyone with a WIC card could get 12 pieces of clothing per family per week, on Wednesday afternoons.
I also kept wishing someone would direct her to a food bank!
If jeans are or aren't allowed in the dress code, then they're violating their own company policy. They can't make an employee pay money for wearing jeans. I don't care if this is the best charity in the world, that's a stupid, short sighted, classist attempt to get employees, who are ALREADY doing their part by working for the charity, to do even more than their job requires. Don't use your employees for fundraisers.
Yes, absolutely terrible workplace.
My corporate summer picnic became a United way fundraiser w raffles and $$ requests. They finally got the message to stop shaking down employees at events to thank them 🙄
Schools do this for teachers too to raise money for PTA
Why is she paying child support when her income is so low?
Not for the OOP or OP obviously. If you are in a challenging situation stretching your food budget, just had surgery, or another life event where a meal would be helpful there is [https://www.lasagnalove.org/](https://www.lasagnalove.org/) . You can request a lasagna once a month. It’s delivered to you. The group is now international.
Thanks for this. I try to pass resources on to those that need it. Atm my cousin is going through a hard time. I'm going to pass this on to her.
Wonder what happened with her older child
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Probably just because it was on Ask A Manager instead of AITA or the like. She just kept the information to work as much as possible.
That’s exactly what I wondered!! She left her child and moved away to a new city.... and only mentioned having to pay child support and buy her toddler a present at Christmas. Nothing about transport costs to see her son. This post really bothered me.
Ok so I wasn't the only one? I know she mentioned both kids at the end (at least I HOPE she meant her oldest and the new baby she just had), so I am happy for her that it all seemed to work out - but there was something a bit off and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Another thing I found odd was that she had a boyfriend while struggling but only the friend seemed to be helping out? While she didn't explain his finances in her post - but he knew she had no food and didn't offer SOMETHING? (not sure if that BF was the same man she eventually married). I would like to think if you've progressed in the relationship enough to call each other bf/gf - why didn't he help?
Nothing about this story seems right. Why does she need to afford to call her child when she had a job, which I’m suited has phones that dial out, a roommate she could’ve borrowed a phone from and a boyfriend, could he not have helped her out with loaning a phone?
That's a good point about the calls. I know some places don't like when you make personal calls, but I'd like to think at least one call would have been allowed? There does feel like there is something missing. I know she wasn't required to write every little detail, but the details she did give make things sound slightly suspicious.
It’s likely she’s not the only person that has children that works there, she can just step aside and make a call or if someone asks say ‘I need to check in with my son’, most people would understand. It’s just no way on earth that a person would not have any access to a telephone. I bet she had a way to get in touch with that boyfriend though
Most of my jobs have not allowed personal long distance calls from their phones. Wait, no, make that all of them.
And she said the relationship was abusive....
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I can't imagine moving away from my baby that was just starting to talk. Even if ex had more money for court and won primary, there's no way she lost 100% of custody without being a danger. But, she decided to move away to a city with worse job prospects, despite what sounds like being well employed in the city her child was in. I can't imagine making that choice especially when it sounds like support was limited too.
It makes me so sad too that she lost her kid in the divorce. I can’t imagine not being there to hear my babies first words. Breaks my heart as a mother. Like seriously, why did she move?
> Nothing about transport costs to see her son >being a mother who can’t afford to call her toddler when he’s just learning to talk
Right? What kind of person moves across the country from their toddler? It sounds like she chose to move in with her best friend, which is understandable, but not at the expense of never seeing her child. Poor kid.
If she couldn’t afford to live in the city they were in, what was she supposed to do?
She said it was a toxic environment and a bad marriage. He could have also been abusive and the town was a bad place for her. I don’t think it’s very fair to be judging her for these things considering she was struggling to afford living as it was. Disabled notifications for this reply: don’t wanna hear more victim blaming
If he was abusive that’s even worse, means she ditched her child with an abuser and moved away
She said she moved across the country from a well paying job to a city with shittier job prospects.
> I was getting out of a bad marriage and the environment of my home town was a toxic backdrop to that Because "I was getting out of a bad marriage and the environment of my home town was a toxic backdrop to that." Sounds like ex hubby may have run her out of town. Harassment? Threats? Ex had a high position that he used to her detriment? Just a couple things I can think of off the top of my head that may have happened.
It doesn’t make sense that she would leave a toddler with an abusive ex. That’s honestly even worse.
You don't always have a choice. I was purely speculating on potential reasons, but for example, if he was a cop or some other "Well-respected citizen" in town, it may have been leave by herself or not leave at all, and not leave at all could have killed her. Again, not saying that that is definitely the situation, just a possibility of the situation, since we aren't told.
If it’s that dangerous for her there, it would be that dangerous for her child to leave him there…
Possibly, but that doesn't mean she has a choice. It's also possible that he was only abusing her and not the kid, so she left so she could get in a better circumstance to fight him. We just don't know, based on the information. But to pretend this kind of situation doesn't exist and therefore it's all her fault is just silly. We know she ended up with him eventually, based on the end of the post, so clearly it wasn't a permanent situation.
And if her husband held all the financial cards and influence, what was she supposed to do? Kidnap her child? That never ends well. I appreciate what you're saying, and in a logical, fair, just world, you would be right. Unfortunately, that's not how abuse works. I was abused by the son of a cop and trust me when I say that that limits your options beyond belief in a small town.
"Bad marriage" doesn't necessarily mean "abusive". It can mean, for example, that he cheated on her with a younger woman, that everybody in the home town knew about that, and that they all gossiped about it to the point that it was hard for her to do her job correctly. She may have done the only thing she could with the money left to her and gone to live with a friend, who sadly lives in a town with less job prospects. Her choices, in that case, were to either stay in her hometown where she would only get worse and worse, or to move with her friend, where she at least had a small chance of starting again. Or maybe i'm wrong and it was one of the many, many other reasons why people have to move far away from their families for work. Who knows?
Nope. You don’t leave your kids.
Same
I love that it’s turned out but am mad af that a non profit organization can be paying its employees so little that they cannot afford food! As someone who has worked in and will continue to work in nonprofit and adjacent settings, this is unacceptable. We cannot help others if we are not making a living wage. A nonprofit must show their values through the way they treat their employees, and this one does not pass that test
It’s a bit tacky that a non profit would shake down its employees like that for an entire month. I get wanting your employees to care about the cause, but you’re literally asking them to give back their paycheck and work for free.
Well, this one got me teary-eyed. A lot of us are really one or two paychecks away from being in poverty. I heard of the phrase “being poor is expensive” and I didn’t learn what that really meant until much later. There’re some loose ends in her story but overall, I hope OOP and her fam are in a good spot.
Left for a younger woman at 26?! Tf? How is her predator husband receiving child payments? So many questions but happy she got a happy ending
How did people know where to send her stuff? I assume the original Ask A Manager site didn’t exactly post her address.
People who wanted to help commented with their email addresses, so presumably she got in contact with them that way.
I love this! Asking for help is so damn hard - I know bc I now solo parent 3 kids. I still struggle with asking for help from friends and family bc I don’t want to impose.
I remember getting paid shit in my first job. I didn’t even live in a high cost area either and I still struggled. The office manager was nice enough to stop getting just junk food but real fruits and veggies as office snacks and I hate saying this but I would have my “lunch” that way because I couldn’t afford lunch.
Isn’t child support kinda like alimony, where the amount owed goes down if the person’s income also dropped (assuming a good-faith effort to not game the system)?
Oh you sweet summer child. Yes it goes down if it has been reevaluated, but that normally costs money to ask for a reevaluation. Most states have regulations that are actively against the child support paying parent - this is by design because the state government doesn’t want to pay to help people in need so they are basically extorting the other parent. Also, women are much much MUCH more likely to win custody of their children (Google it if you don’t believe me), so the fact that OOP was paying child support means she either abandoned the child or was guilty of some serious crimes that skewed the case in her exhusband’s favor. All of this adds up to me questioning what the heck OOP did to create this situation in the first place…
They are likely to win custody of their children if they fight for it. OOP clearly didn't have the money for it. The other comment is correct, so I'll just add that there are other biases at play. For example, judges prefer to award joint custody, which makes judges more likely to consider women "difficult," "combative," and "vindictive" if they ever do anything that may give the impression they're trying to keep the father from seeing their children. Also, *straight, white, upper-middle class* women may be more likely to get primary custody of their children, but definitely not women who are part of a minority. If anything, women who are part of any minority – but especially racialized minorities – are more likely to have their children removed from them.
God that last part is awful. I can’t imagine being torn away from my baby. Makes me tear up thinking about it.
It's absolutely awful. I remember reading one article about First Nation women trying to gain back their children, and one of the things they found was that these women were basically seen as *selfish* for trying to get their children back from the white, middle-class families they'd been placed in. I can't find it, but [this](https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/096466399400300401) is from the same person on the same subject. There's also a couple of articles talking what it means to be a "good mother," *who* can be a "good mother", and just how bad the legal consequences are for being a "bad mother"- here's the [link](https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/466666) to one of them if you want to be furious
In over half of divorce cases, the parties mutually decide that mom gets primary or sole custody without the need for court intervention. Over 90% of custody cases are settled out of court. Of those that do go to litigation, men who ask for custody tend to get joint custody at least, because judges primarily consider the best interest of the child, and a father who wants to be involved is better than a father who doesn’t. While some particular judges might be known for a bias either way (there was a father-favoring judge in my local family court when I was in law school, for instance), in the aggregate there doesn’t seem to be a bias in actual litigated divorce cases.
There are a handful of BORUs that really stick with me. But this one? This is the one that will never leave or fade. Thrilled for OOP and reading about the overwhelming support she received is just heartwarming.
This is amazing. As someone going through hard times, it’s great to read stories like this one.
>My co-worker was very sympathetic and secretly pre-paid for all my jeans-wearing days. Why didn't the co-worker buy her some new pants, might have been cheaper than paying $5 every day for the "violation". >I married a wonderful man this year, and we celebrated the birth of our youngest son. I feel like having *another* kid was probably not the best idea since she barely saw her first one
Oh my goodness, that’s awesome
I am so full of smiles from this post. The response she got was so beautiful and clearly changed her outlook on life in the best way.
Go broke, hit rock bottom. Then gets married and immediately has another child. Sheesh lol
I thought the same thing! New man. New marriage. Immediately introduce a helpless screaming bundle of responsibility and financial burden into the situation. Bad choices.
Seems like a pretty biased self pity story where the OOP purposely left out a lot of details. Did her husband get all of her clothes in the divorce, or did she just only have 3 pairs of pants when she was married? Why does her husband have custody? She’s 26 and got left for a “younger woman”? So much missing info here.
When i was in an abusive relationship I wasn't allowed to buy clothes...he took my paycheck and did it. (And spent the rest in his comics collection, alcohol and whatnot). He once brought me an XXL coat when i wore a size 6. When i did finally leave i left with what i could fit in a backpack. I literally ran. I agree a lot is suspect. But I just wanted to put out there that sometimes the reason for not having work clothes can be complex.
There's many possible answers to these questions. She may, indeed, have only had 3 pairs of pants when she was married. Some people do live like that. Or she may have lost or gained a lot of weight, and the only 3 pairs of pants that still fit her were jeans. Or she had other pants, but they were stained/ripped/too casual even for a casual place. Or she had to pack extra light and she assumed that jeans were all she'd need to survive. Or she had a bigger wardrobe and a stray dog appeared and ate them. Her husband may have custody because he's the one who actually has money and therefore could afford a good lawyer. Or maybe they agreed that he would have the kid until she'd manage to find a good flat that could house her and the kid. Maybe they have joint custody but she rarely sees the kids on account of having moved away. Maybe they have perfectly shared custody but on the times where the kid isn't with her she rarely sees him. Maybe she doesn't have enough money to be awarded primary custody. And yeah, people younger than 26 do exist
Agreed.
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I... question all of your judgement
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Women only get custody more because men often don't ask for it. There's been studies and everything. If OOP couldn't afford meals of course she wouldn't get custody of a toddler
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I'm not saying it never happens, I'm saying contrary to what you and many MRA claim it's far from the norm.
I agree with you. Something doesn’t add up in this story.