Email sent Friday, March 15:
Hello,
On several occasions I have emailed Simon and asked for clarification, but have not received a response. After Trisha contacted me this week to ask where my timesheet was, I have even more questions.
I have assumed that my services are no longer required by either of the At Home stores. Yet, I have yet to receive any information to verify this, or to give any reason why. As a contracted service provider, I know that you are under no obligation to retain my services or make any compensation. But as someone who has, as far as I know, provided good work and gone above and beyond my pay grade many times, it's extremely unprofessional to have not received some sort of confirmation.
As this has been rather aggravating, to say the least, I do not wish to call or come into the store. It has also occurred to me that Simon no longer works there, but as a friend I would have thought he'd let me know. Has he sustained an accident or worse?
Will someone please respond to this email and clarify the situation as soon as possible?
Thank you,
Nancy Ragghianti
Immediate response from the store owner, who is allegedly a former English teacher. Ahem:
I had not realize that Simon had not responded to your cocerns!
I will get with him asap!
Sorry about the lack of communication on this matter.
Email received Monday, March 18:
You always could have called. I will try you a little later.
My response:
I do not want a phone call. I want written communication, not a confrontation.
His BS:
Why would you think there was going to be a confrontation.
You emailed that you assumed you were no longer working here without taking into account anything else. Such as people being busy and/or sick. Or the fact that independent contractors are usually proactive about seeing if clients have work instead of waiting for them to reach out.
I have no personal issue and never have had one. We've talked enough that you should know I separate the work and home quite well.
Since you had assumed you were not doing any more work here we chose to move forward with an alternate plan of attack going forward. Thats all.
My retort:
This is preposterous. You have ALWAYS contacted me. In fact, you've generally hounded me to do more work than I had time for. It appears to me that you've decided you want to do all the graphics work yourself, which I don't understand. I had written to you asking about the plan for March, and was ignored. Suddenly that FB cover popped up, and you had no explanation why. I wrote again asking what was going on, and got no response.
This is a really disingenuous response. I would appreciate an honest, straightforward answer.
And then, the final fuckery:
I greatly disagree with the term 'hounded' as for over a year i had simply asked you to come by for a couple hours once a week so we could touch base. Yet, that was almost always to difficult to pull off.
So since you made the assumption your services were not needed based off a single Facebook cover, which i am allowed to do whenever i want, it seemed like a good point to move forward in another direction.
Considering you didn't want to be confrontational, the tone of your messages from the beginning has been off putting and I was choosing not to respond instead of responding a similar manner.
I find the rapidity of the breakdown disappointing, but it is likely best that this is the final communication as far as past services rendered and anything business wise moving forward.
So there you have it. Question for the class: is this a form of gaslighting, or is there a better categorization? I'm guessing it fits, since it's putting all the burden on me.
