Although Donovan was an experienced supervisor in his professional life, he finds it difficult to supervise the two live-in caregivers.

Transcript

Way back when I worked, I was supervising most of my work life and I did well. I could supervise. And I have difficulty now supervising the 2 workers that we’ve got. I just find it quite difficult. Part of the reason is because we are with them all the time. When you are at work, you are at work and you’re dealing with people for 8 hours a day or whatever. So, you don’t… when you leave, you go home you, they’re gone and they’re employees. But this situation is very different because they are with us. Now, they don’t interfere—excuse me—they are really good in one big sense; they don’t hang around us if there’s nothing for them to do on the house or the cleaning or the cooking. They go to the bedroom and they just stay in there with their telephones and their laptops and whatever; they don’t bug us. And we sometimes wish that they would participate a bit in the house. They are not interested in us, it doesn’t seem like. They never ask us questions about us—well, hardly ever. So, we were kind of led to believe before we got these people that often these women that come over from the Philippines end up almost like a family member. Well it didn’t happen and it’s not happening with us anyway. Maybe it’s our personalities or my personality that prevents it, I don’t know. But it’s hard to supervise and to ask them to do something differently. Where do you draw the line? I’m an employer; they’re an employee. It’s hard to straddle that line. I’m finding it very difficult. So anyway, the overall effect has been—the stress on me is, I can feel it most of the time subconsciously. I’m never away from it.

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