Office Cat Tales - Session 4

This last week has not been unlike prior weeks here in my office, with one exception that has left me a little confused about my human staff. One of my staff members has been off work for a short time as she was nearing the end of her pregnancy. As I am a female cat I can understand that carrying a litter is hard work and humans carry their litters for far longer than we cats do. My confusion is over the fact that she only had one baby? I am sure that I must have heard that wrong. Humans carry their babies for nine long months and from what I have seen they get very large bellies. But to only have one baby for all of that really leaves me feeling confused. In fact this is not the first time that I have seen this. In the last six months or so two of my human staff have had babies. Oddly it seems that both of them only had one. It makes me wonder if they actually had a litter and only kept one but I am not sure. All of my human staff seem to be very compassionate and emotional beings, so the thought of them not keeping part of their litter seems like it would be unheard of for them. Of course my confusion with my staff members having babies doesn’t stop there. It seems as though they go to a hospital to give birth! I don’t know why they would do such a thing. Is a nice cozy box in a dark corner too good for them? It seems as though every time one of them is pregnant they start talking about the different hospitals in the area that they can have their babies at. I hear them talk about Tacoma General, Saint Joseph's and other local hospitals. My mother gave birth to me under a bed and totally unassisted. Humans truly are strange creatures, but nothing beats their ability to give me great belly rubs!

Aside from my obvious confuse over human reproduction, I did get to have some fun this week. You see the office that I run is an answering service. In case you don’t know what that is, an answering service answers phones for doctors offices, plumbers, roofers, and all sorts of businesses when the business is unable to answer the phone or has a special phone line set up for specific types of calls that the answering service handle for the business or doctors office. Since they are handling confidential information that’s really all that I can tell you about that. Since they handle this confidential information everything in their office they shred all of their paper items when they are done with them. For the last few months I have been waiting for one of my staff members to leave a bag of this shredded paper on the floor rather than taking it to where ever they take that paper and they finally left it on the floor during one of the staff members breaks! Keep in mind that this paper is shredded in about six different directions so that it more or less turns into confetti. For a cat, that is a big bag of fun! I have tried to get into one of these bags before, but they are plastic and the make noise when I try to slice them open with claws, alarming my human staff to what I am about to do. This time was special though, the other staff members were busy. I touched it to see if the noise would get their attention and when it didn’t I dug right in! Oh what blissful fun playing in that confetti was! Of course my human staff didn’t find it as funny as I did... But they did giggle a little and cleaned up the mess, I bet they will never leave one of those bags in my reach again!

This week I am going to focus on the many different ways I can spook my staff! Maybe I will start with something simple like hiding under their desks, playing with their shoe lace, jumping at their hair and swatting at any fingers that I see dangling down from their chairs and desks. I figure that this should get a good rise out of them. There is nothing wrong with having a little fun on the job, as long as it is safe and it doesn’t interfere with my staffs job details! I wonder what it would be like to run a pet store like PetsMart or PetCo or any of the others that I have heard about in Tacoma? I bet those office cats have more toys than I do but nothing could ever be better than my staff that I have now.