2006-05-17
A Business Trip
I had to get a dog-sitter for an upcoming business trip.
So many things are wrong with that sentence... I don't even know where to start.
A. Business trip.
To Milwaukee in June. Business trips mean that people like me might be exposed as frauds. Let's say you're on the way up in your earnings and your luggage sucks and you're not on the company's Blackberry system and your cell phone only has 300 Anytime Minutes.
And you have to get on a plane and then ride in a rental with people who are in very different positions than you.
Make it worse by not having credit cards so you have to request expense money from your company and be to tool with money hidden all over her person.
Like I WANT to pull a $20 out of my bra to pay for lunch.
I HATE business trips.
I hate them.
B. The d-o-double-g.
She's great.
She will have less trouble being left than I will have leaving her. It's really easy to default your internal freak-out about business trips in a way so that it looks to your colleagues that you are super-attached to your adorable little dog and you miss her a lot.
And that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because you're talking about your dog and then you're thinking about her and then you fucking miss the hell out of your dog who, normally; you are probably cursing at because she busted out the screen door AGAIN and you're going to be spending your Thursday night with a staple gun.
So I though it would be genius to get a little network of people in the same location as I am together and have a reliable pet-sitting trade going on.
I put a post on Craig's List and I got a huge number of responses and I'm working up an email list to ask everyone how they feel about becoming part of a Group. Free pet-sitting, in trade for pet-sitting.
Professionals and grad students only, female or couple preferred.
It's brilliant, I know.
You can start the same kind of thing in your town but for your needs, if you want to.
And I finally confirm with this girl who has three bunnies and lives in the cutest guest house you have EVER seen.
We met up yesterday to go over the run-down of her pets' needs and ummmmmm.....
basically.....
I do not want this chick to see my crappy place.
She's a little younger and still looks good in baby-pink. Everything is off-white and framed in her place.
I mean it's one room and there are three bunnies but pretty much she's the type of gal who can grow flowers and they don't die; who can have three bunnies in a one-room apartment and not have doodies and fur everywhere; who can even admit to me that the bunnies sometimes pee on her bed and yet.....
Her bed looked more appealing than mine looks after two hours of skating and a hard day in the Cubical Castle.
It's not fair.
She showed me her room of shame, a tiny back room where things were piled high, thing like luggage, the hot-water heater, and maybe an ab-roller.
Room of shame?
Honey, open any door in my place and stand the hell back because what might fall off of the shelves or come bursting forth with the sole intention of scaring you and/or reminding you that I still need to call the exterminator is far more shameful than your unused stair-master back there.
So now, not only am I going on a business trip to Milwaukee, which I think it's fair to say is the least sexy place for a business trip that I've ever heard of.
And the chick who's going to be dog-sitting for me is going to walk into my place, see the smush of junk that I call "kitchen" and turn around and leave and probably confiscate my dog for living in unsafe conditions.
Her rabbits had cardboard houses with little Exacto French doors and the French doors had four pairs of window, running side-by-side.
The cardboard doors opened, people, they opened.
Rosie has a metal crate with a towel that's clean most of the time.
My dog plays with cat feces and this lady�s bunnies play with rabbit-sized teddy bears that look freshly washed an line-dried.
I know it can�t be that bad.
My pets don�t pee on my bed and that�s a hug from Jesus, I know.
But at the same time�.
I TOTALLY came home and cleaned the �kitchen� and put every piece of paper, every hurriedly-removed clothing label, and every other useless piece of crap sitting around; I put all that stuff in the trash.
The place looks better but I am going to have to figure out how to get a maid in there before departure.
arizonasarah at 9:53 a.m.