Have I ever told you about the trouble we have training our feline assistant?
It goes like this. We adopted a little rescue cat named Wren. She has one eye and is mostly blind and wants to do whatever we do–especially whatever Joh is doing. This means that if Joh is cleaning under the carpet strip, Wren is reaching under the carpet strip to help. If Joh is pulling things down from the loft, Wren is perched on his feet on the tall stool and reaching up for whatever Joh is passing down. And indeed, when Joh and I were moving furniture and tilting a bookcase through a doorway, Wren got up on her hind legs in front of me and helped me lean against the bookcase to tilt it.
Needless to say, this is never helpful but always appreciated. And if you try to stop her from helping, she hisses and yowls and throws a tantrum. It is her job to help us, as far as she is concerned, and nothing can stand in the way of that.
Now, this leads to more trouble than you might expect. Wren will climb into the dishwasher while you’re unloading dishes and ‘helpfully’ chew on the dish rack. Wren will turn the air purifier on and off about 30 consecutive times in 10 seconds, because she can tell that’s what we’re doing right now (I about died laughing when she first did this). She will also throw a massive tantrum if she can hear you doing something in another room without her. But Wren is also a very routined little cat. And it turns out, if we don’t do something on time…she might just go ahead and do it without us.
Every evening before we go to bed, Joh empties our robot hoover and Wren sits with him and touches the hoover, too, and is very ‘helpful’. This involves flipping the hoover over to empty out its chambers and clean its brush.
Well, we were late to bed one night and we heard an almighty crash, followed by our hoover talking about ‘returning home’. We went out into the hallway and discovered that Wren had gotten tired of waiting for Joh to empty the hoover, and had tried to flip it herself, with her tiny paws. The hoover is heavier than she is. I have no idea how she lifted it at all. Thankfully, she didn’t manage to flip it on its back, but given the noise and how far she’d flung the hoover’s charging port, I think she must have given it a hearty attempt.
So anyway. Our little assistant will apparently take things into her own paws. And that’s the story of how our cat will do our chores for us if we aren’t prompt enough.
The end.