Animal Tails

Plugging in...

I’m perfectly happy to work on someone’s home computer – alone. Sometimes our schedules don’t click and I am trusted to be at their home, unaccompanied. Except for maybe the rogue cockatiel, dog or ferret.

Not being a current pet owner, I’m uncertain how much run of the house a pet is given while the owner’s are away. I found out at one house just how much leeway the precious pets had.

I was working on a young man’s computer, the son of a client, who had an entire floor to himself for his bedroom. Envious? Me too. So there I sat, focused solely on the project at hand, eradicating a virus, installing a new printer, doing some system maintenance. I’d worked on this computer before, so I was aware of the pets in the household and in particular, the birdcage in this room. The bird cage door was not closed, nor was the bird in it. Mr. Bird was peering at me from across the room. And for awhile I was left alone. For some reason, the bird decided I’d overstayed my welcome and proceeded to repeatedly dive bomb my head. Though it was annoying, I held my ground and after several flight patterns, Mr. Bird went back to peering at me from the top of the cage.

Safe. Good, I still had more work to do. Focusing once again, both hands now free from swatting a flapping bird at my head, I continued. It wasn’t long before I felt the weirdest little tug at my pant leg. My attention was quickly diverted, but not before the dang ferret crawled up inside my pant leg! I knew the young man owned a ferret, I didn’t know that it was loose and in the room with me. The little guy didn’t make a peep when I came into the room, or when I cursed the dive-bombing cockatiel. No, he waited for his own, personal chance to assault an unsuspecting stranger. They are cute, but I still had work to do.

He finally stopped crawling all over me, inside the pant leg, across my shoulders, on my lap, across the keyboard. He eventually gave up and sat on the bed behind me. If a dive-bombing bird couldn’t stop me, a wandering ferret didn’t stand a chance.

I finished my work, success on all fronts. I packed up my tutoring tools and thought I was going to walk down the stairs, close the door and go on to the next tutoring job. But nooooo. Ferrets are fast, and they are playful. The ferret kept racing me down the stairs, sitting in front of the door. That door, I knew, needed to be closed because, yep – you guessed it – more pets on the floor below. Two dogs. The two dogs and the ferret were not the best of friends. I lost count how many times I grabbed the ferret, walked back upstairs and attempted to run down the stairs before you-know-who got there first. Clearly I had to do something else. I grabbed the ferret one more time and brought him back upstairs. I put him in the spare bed, under the covers, where I knew he liked to hide (don’t ask how I knew this). I “tucked” him in and ran like crazy down the stairs and slammed the door. I laughed like a dope behind the door, caught my breath and left through the front door, dignity intact, no bird droppings in my hair and no ferret attached to my leg.

Yes, I got paid for all this, no extra charge for the entertainment.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: before calling for help - is it plugged in, is it turned on?

Unplugged