What Not to Look for in a Cat-Sitter
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 3:16 pm
Some years ago, I was visiting a government office out in the boonies in connection with my work. I had lunch with an attorney who worked in the office, and she told me about an unfortunate incident that had occurred while she was cat-sitting for a neighbor. The neighbor had both a cat and a parakeet as pets, and the attorney had volunteered to stop by and feed the pets on a daily basis, making sure they were okay. On the first visit, everything went well. But on the second day, the attorney was horrified to discover the cat doing just fine but the parakeet lying dead in the cat's food dish. Apparently the sitter had failed to latch the cage door properly when she opened it to feed the parakeet. She told me she had briefly considered simply burying the parakeet, procuring one of similar color from a nearby pet store, and not mentioning the mishap. However, she realized there might be distinctive things about this parakeet that weren't evident to her. She therefore buried the poor thing in the neighbor's garden and 'fessed up when the neighbor returned home. Her career as a cat-sitter might well have been over, however.
A week or so ago, an elderly gentleman who's a friend of mine undertook to cat-sit for his neighbors on the third floor of a condo building. The couple have two cats but (thankfully) no birds of any kind. My friend dutifully let himself into their apartment twice a day to check on the cats and assure that they had food, water and other necessities. The building in which these people live is in a very busy commercial area that's teeming with traffic. Most of the apartments have balconies. A couple of days after his neighbors left, my friend, who has two cats of his own, got a telephone call from someone living on the second floor of his building. The caller asked if my friend was missing a cat. Since his cats were present and accounted for, he said, "No." The caller then explained that she had come home from work to find a strange cat on her second-floor balcony and couldn't imagine where it had come from. It happens that she lives just below the neighbors for whom my friend was cat-sitting. (Sound of squeaky wheels turning...) Fortunately the cat was unharmed. If it had fallen the entire two stories or gotten onto the ground floor by other means, it probably wouldn't have survived. I wonder if my friend has told Fluffy's owners this story...
A week or so ago, an elderly gentleman who's a friend of mine undertook to cat-sit for his neighbors on the third floor of a condo building. The couple have two cats but (thankfully) no birds of any kind. My friend dutifully let himself into their apartment twice a day to check on the cats and assure that they had food, water and other necessities. The building in which these people live is in a very busy commercial area that's teeming with traffic. Most of the apartments have balconies. A couple of days after his neighbors left, my friend, who has two cats of his own, got a telephone call from someone living on the second floor of his building. The caller asked if my friend was missing a cat. Since his cats were present and accounted for, he said, "No." The caller then explained that she had come home from work to find a strange cat on her second-floor balcony and couldn't imagine where it had come from. It happens that she lives just below the neighbors for whom my friend was cat-sitting. (Sound of squeaky wheels turning...) Fortunately the cat was unharmed. If it had fallen the entire two stories or gotten onto the ground floor by other means, it probably wouldn't have survived. I wonder if my friend has told Fluffy's owners this story...
