first firing

I never had to fire anyone from anything in my life until today, when the maid had to go for reasons of theft (a fairly valuable item). It was, of course, an unpleasant conversation. But my faith in my own judgment was not shaken when I was told that I should calculate how much the stolen item was worth and subtract it from the monthly salary and pay that salary as severance. No no no. Doesn’t work like that. You cannot steal items from my home as a salary advance.

There were three other things taken in the past, but I wasn’t entirely sure if I was right. The item currently in question is one that I checked up on carefully after each workday, and suddenly it was gone. And I was already paying triple the going rate just to help out. Time to help someone else instead. You have to clean Cairo apartments pretty regularly, or a sort of thin, sandy dust starts to cover everything.

Granted, there’s one detail so far about Payton saying he was going to kill everyone around him too, but so far that sounds like one wild statement at a weak moment. For the most part, he was simply talking about taking is own life and felt unappreciated after his career. But why is it so surprising that someone who was a national celebrity throughout his 20’s and early 30’s would suddenly feel empty once his early stardom was over? I’ll always have good memories of Payton, unless they come up with something a lot worse than this.