One of my best friends has taken to taking the oddest jobs since starting college. They are not all completely strange; in fact, some of them are relatively typical, like waitressing, as she currently does, at a local bar and restaurant. She also baby sits a lot. But others are sort of bizarre. She pet sits, for example. I guess that isn’t totally off the wall, but sometimes she has really strange pets to pet sit: lizards, snakes, even a giant black spider once.
Often she gets to live in the house where the pets live, when she pet sits – or at least spends a lot of time there, hanging out with the pets, making sure they are okay. Once she sat a decrepit cat who looked like he was on his last legs. His owners were gone for a month and a half on a cruise and she was terrified he was going to die before they got back.
There is a certain level of damage control that goes along with such a job, of course. Especially when you are something of a free spirit, like my friend is, and you like to invite your friends over to the houses of those you are pet sitting for, from time to time. I’ve never gone, but I know she had one incident where another friend of hers took her up on the standing invitation to visit her and her passel of foster pets. He showed up a little bit inebriated, drinking a grande mocha from Starbucks to sober up a little, and ended up dumping the grande mocha all over the large and expensive-looking dog beds that the Doberman Pinscher my friend was dog sitting habituated during his nap and sleep time.
What ensued was a goose chase through all of the stores that sold beds for dogs in the city area. The owners had cut the tags off of this bed so my friend didn’t even know what brand it was. All she knew was that it was big, plaid, durable, and looked expensive. She raided every PetSmart and PetCo she could find, but came up with nothing that resembled it anywhere near enough to make it worth buying.
Luckily all her worrying was for naught: the owners came home and said that it was about time to get a new dog bed anyway. This one was beginning to smell.
