My mother referred to my older daughter as a freeloader for living with me. She was happy that she now had an area in her refrigerator to store food. My aunt said, “I can’t believe Emily, who is 25, is still having a meltdown because she didn’t get hired by KFC, and here she is still jobless.”
My family members told me how many times they sent me texts last night (68) and called me (32) once they heard of Emily’s passing.
When Emily moved out of her mother’s house, I thought the hardest thing for her would be getting her mattress down a staircase that was less wide than she was long. I was wrong. After getting settled in her apartment, Emily started unpacking her three boxes that had cardboard and were falling apart. After she finished unpacking her boxes, Emily started getting calls on her cell phone every few seconds. At first, she thought it was someone showing support for her. Then she logged onto Facebook.
She saw that her mother, Linda, had posted a photograph of Emily’s old bedroom and wrote, “This 30-year-old is out of my house, so now I don’t have to buy groceries for her!”
Within a short time after Linda posted this, the post received over 1,000 “likes.”
As Emily read through the comments, her jaw dropped.There was such an influx of activity that Emily’s Aunt Patricia was the next person to make a comment, stating, “Megan! When Emily was 25 years old, KFC rejected her and she cried!” In response to this, Megan tagged three of her friends, saying, “Hey boys! Here’s your future wife; so be careful.” Emily’s ex-boyfriend Daniel had liked the post that Emily’s mother had posted. Along with all the comments, several of Emily’s former coworkers and friends had commented about how Emily had struggled with her weight, didn’t get jobs after interviewing, got so nervous during interviews that she had panic attacks, has student loans to pay off, and was still living at home with her parents under the same yellow drapery that she had picked out when she was twelve. Most everyone was treating it as if the situation were a sitcom.
But Emily didn’t cry.
Emily took screenshots of all the comments, and by the end of the day, she had liked all of the comments made about her. This included all of the comments made by her mom, aunt (insult), Megan (tagged), and Daniel (reaction).
Afterwards, Megan texted Emily almost immediately, asking why she was liking everything and if she was acting weird.
Emily replied saying no, she was just making memories.
Emily then set her phone down onto the counter and began to take a look around. There was a water stain on the ceiling, the radiator rattled every few minutes, and the refrigerator was almost empty containing only a couple of eggs, a few apples, and a half jar of peanut butter.For the first time in a long time, Emily didn’t have family members downstairs yelling at her for being lazy or asking her why she was too sensitive and couldn’t take a joke. After months of hiding her financial and personal documents, she finally decided to come clean about keeping everything in a locked bin. In addition, Emily was able to open the box and find all of the documents necessary for completing the Harrison Mutual Insurance settlement.
Emily was alone for twelve days in her room without receiving any communication from her family. On the morning of the thirteenth day, Linda received a phone call from Emily who informed Linda regarding the numerous messages she had received and the letter from the attorney as well as the twelve days of silence she had.
As of noon, the laughter from the previous day was gone.
During the six months prior to Emily’s embarrassment on Facebook, Emily was employed as a Claims Assistant for Harrison Mutual Insurance working from her home. A Claims Assistant has a very demanding job and typically requires a lot of hours of hard work as well as working under very difficult supervision. Emily never shared her work with any family members as well as the times that she did express to her family members the things that frustrated her about her job, her family always made her frustrations into a negative experience.
Emily’s family always trivialized the way she felt about being tired and made it seem as if she were overly emotional and reactive.Megan always told Emily that she was lucky to be working, even though it stressed her out, and Patricia would answer her question about saving money with something like, “What do you need money for? To buy a castle?”
Eventually, Emily stopped trying to justify her feelings to her family, since she was starting to lose her patience with them.
While working for Harrison Mutual, Emily came to realize more troubling things. She found that many of the elderly clients were paying claims based on an unfortunate fire or an emergency medical incident that had happened months ago. Most still had not received payment yet; some have waited several months now. Some do not even have compensation, and, when she checked with the former employer, they were also told that they had lost documents; however, Emily later discovered that the former employer had actually scanned all missing documents into their company’s database.
At first, Emily assumed the former employer made a mistake, until she received an email from a supervisor at Harrison Mutual.
In the email from the supervisor, he states that they will not send payments to clients until there are no further contact attempts regarding payment issues from the client. Furthermore, all closed accounts would receive payment at the end of quarterly.
Emily could interpret from that email that vulnerable clients would only be contacted if they called or emailed requesting payment, but if they didn’t, they were just going to wait until they quit contacting the company to get payment.Upon coming to this realization, Emily contacted Human Resources to report the wrongful termination of her mother Linda just two weeks after she had reported to Human Resources. Linda, who had been terminated for “poor performance” following her son’s termination.
When Linda arrived home from work on that particular day, she was carrying a cardboard box of her personal items. She walked in and found Emily in the living room watching television. Linda started asking Emily about the reasons for her termination, but before Emily could finish explaining the reason for her mom’s termination, her mom interrupted her.
“Really? You got fired AGAIN?” said Linda in a very critical manner, “When are you going to look in the mirror and realize that YOU are the problem Emily?”
That same evening after meeting up with her mom, Emily found herself sitting on the bathroom floor on the phone with a lawyer. Emily found a lawyer, Marcus Reed, on a whistleblower protection website who listened to her and gave her the guidance and support she needed.
Thankful for the time spent talking to Marcus Reed, Emily has compiled a number of documents over the following months and provided those documents to Marcus. Included in this documentation were email correspondence with the previous employer, call logs related to the clients stolen from her previous employer, statutory sworn statements by clients and copies of sworn statements made to the state investigators in their investigation of Harrison Mutual. Each of these documents was tremendously frightening to Emily. However, at the same time, there was a tremendous amount of new self-esteem being created from these documents.
As a result of the time and effort and energy that Emily contributed to Marcus’s ability to gather the required documentation for the state investigations, the event became greater than anticipated.
In an effort to resolve the issue before it was made known to the public, Harrison Mutual reached out to Emily for a settlement before the state investigation began and, because of its prior conduct towards Emily and her mother, Harrison Mutual has agreed to reimburse the affected clients as well as Emily for the wrongful termination and retaliation due to the termination of her employment with Harrison Mutual.