Helper and Facebook

A couple of weeks ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from a stranger. The stranger happened to be my current helper, except that her FB name was a totally new one bearing no resemblance to the name that she used for her employment with me. Besides the name, other info such as education and place where she came from seems to be fictional (unless her passport is fictional ? which I hope not). I declined the request and didn't say anything to her. She said nothing to me either about the request or FB. She seemed to have blocked me thereafter as I could no longer see her via my FB. However, I have been able still to read her FB page as all information about her, her posts, photos and everything else is "public". Anyone in the world can read it. I can see that she stays up until 1 a.m. to post things on FB (though she is in her room by 10 or 10:30pm) and during the day, even when my child is home from school, she has a message, a comment or a photo posted on FB every hour or so or at time more often. All the posts and comments from her and her friends are in a foreign language that I don't understand. Among her hundreds of friends, some have weird names, so weird that you know at first sight that they can't be real. I have a very uncomfortable feeling about seeing "another face" of her that has hitherto been totally unknown to me. She is relatively young. I have no issue about her being on FB or surfing the internet in her free time, but fake profile, fake information? Please tell me, am I being too outdated? Am I right to worry? I don't know why she invited me to be her friend in the first place. If she hadn't invited me, I wouldn't have known that she's on FB using a fake name. She's been with me for almost a year. I'm still adjusting to cultural differences including the fact that we do not communicate well as her English is not good and I have to use google translate to sometimes get a message through to her.

Maybe she has a genuine reason for using a different name ... maybe she wants to keep her life in Hong Kong private from people back home ... who knows? I would imagine that if she was up to something underhand, she wouldn't have invited you to be her friend on fb. The only way to find out the reason and put your mind at rest, is to ask why she uses a different name on fb.


What I would be more concerned/annoyed about is the fact that she seems to be constantly using it when she's supposed to be taking care of your child. No employee, whether they be office workers, shop workers, restaurant workers, DH's, or whatever, should be using fb or making personal calls, etc, during working hours ... especially if they have the responsibility of looking after someone's child.


You need to discuss the matter with her and give her a warning. Let her know that what she's doing is not acceptable during working hours. Tell her she can spend as much time as she likes on fb when she's finished working for the day, but under no circumstances should she be doing it when looking after your child. If you find out it continues, you need to give her another warning. If there's cause for a third warning, then you need to decide if you're happy to keep her, knowing that she's going against what you've said, and not paying as much attention to your child as she should be.

Don't worry about this, half the teenagers in HK have multiple identies on FB. I draw the line at when or if the helper starts posting photos of my house or family on her FB page. Otherwise, 'don't sweat the small stuff'.

I had a helper like that. She was on fb almost 24 hours a day. She would be updating at 2am, 4am, 5am...etc and then almost every hour during the day. I wonder if she got any work done And then during the day, when she's suppose to be taking my son to playgroups, she'd be on it constantly liking her own photos and chatting with her friends. She didn't use her real name either and claims to be a nurse on her profile.


you should take it as a sign of caution that she might not be doing her job.