BabySitters.com

Overview

BabySitters.com is a web site which provides a venue wherein parents may make contact with childsitters.

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Links

Reference

• official site

Experiences

The Hypertwins

I'm finding myself a bit frustrated with this site; I'm not done trying to use it, and will report further as my attempts continue. Here's what has happened so far:

• Tried to sign up last night, but the site refused my Amex card. It wouldn't say why. I tried the number with and without dashes. I retired without dashes two or three times, in case I had mis-entered the number (due to the lack of separators to make it easy to check).
• Sent in a webmail through the site's problem-reporting page. Got email confirmation that I had sent in the problem report, but no evidence of any action nearly 24 hours later. Gave up and used a different card (Visa).
• Tried to post a "job"; I was finding it very difficult to fit my requirements into the questions they ask. I have a screenshot and will post it later, but in summary:
  • Although there is a choice for "multiple dates", the things you have to fill out for this are confusing and counterproductive:
    • You can only choose one time-range, in total; we need two time-slots filled on each day. (I put in the earliest and latest times we needed as the "start" and "end" times, hoping that any potential sitters will actually read my description rather than trusting in the form.) You can't leave it blank, which is what I tried first.
    • It asks "Repeats on the following day(s):", with a checkbox for each day of the week. What the heck does this mean? I need care from the 19th to the 27th, and they already have those dates. Again, I wasn't able to leave all the checkboxes blank... so, figuring that our dates included all 7 days of the week, I checked off all the boxes. But still... how is that useful?
  • There were a couple of checkboxes I almost checked, but I didn't want babysitters.com to not send our job request to anyone just because they didn't happen to meet those qualifications: "I need a babysitter who owns a car or can provide her/his own transportation" – well, we'd prefer that, but if that's the only hitch, they could borrow the mini-van; "I need a babysitter with experience caring for a child with special needs" – again, we have at least one child with specific needs, but since we're seriously having difficulty lining anyone up, we're willing to work with someone who's just willing to deal with the special needs and learn in the process.
  • Then there were two essay questions, "Describe Your Family: Use this section to tell babysitters about your family. Include any activities that your children love to do, the temperament of each child, etc." and "Tell Us What Qualities You Seek in a Babysitter: Use this section to tell babysitters what type of qualities that you seek in a babysitter." Neither of these asks what it is that we actually need the sitter to do, which I consider to be the main question they should be asking. I spent some time thinking about it, then typed up a brief synopsis of the kids for the first question, then for the second I started with "I don't know if this site is going to let me explain what we actually need done, so here's a link:..." and linked to our wiki page where it explains what we need... and then proceeded to answer the "qualities in a childsitter" question. And then, just to be sure I had it all reasonably okay in spite of the shoehorning, I read it out loud to Harena...
• And then, after I had read everything I had typed out loud to Harena (to make sure she was in agreement that I was taking the right approach), the damn site logged me out and lost everything I had typed.