My best friend/partner in cat sitting T scheduled an appointment with Time Warner Cable the other day because she hasn't been receiving all of her channels. She works in an office during the day, and I work at home, so I agreed to sit in her apartment and wait for the cable man.
When he arrived, T's cats Sam and Mercury ran for their lives, taking cover under a comforter on T's bed. They are afraid of strangers.
I'm not and am always happy to have someone to chat with. I tried to break the ice with the cable man, posing the question anyone would ask to initiate a conversation, "Do you have a cat?"
"No," he answered.
"I write a blog about cats," I said.
He didn't say anything in reply.
I got the feeling he didn't want to talk to me, so I kept quiet.
After replacing the cable box, he appeared to have corrected the problem and was switching from channel to channel when he came upon the movie The Astronaut Farmer just in time for us to see Billy Bob Thornton blast into space.
I couldn't resist talking again. "I would love to go into space," I told him.
"Who wouldn't?" he said.
Apparently, my space chat broke the ice. The cable man said he had seen The Astronaut Farmer before and told me a bit about the movie while we watched Billy Bob orbit the Earth. I explained that I don't want to go into space for more than a day or two because I don't think I could handle the lack of gravity much longer than that.
As we watched the movie and chatted about space, the cable man realized that the picture on T's television still didn't look quite right, so he went up on the roof to check the cables up there. He didn't see any problems.
Then he took a look at the cables that enter T's apartment through the living room wall.
"This is the problem," he said, snapping sections of the cables off and showing them to me. They were covered with tiny bite marks.
"Her cats have been biting the cables," he informed me, noting that he was supposed to charge T to replace the damaged cables but he was going to do it for free.
I thanked him profusely, then phoned T to tell on the cats. While she has never seen either of the cats nibbling on the cable, she insisted that it had to be Sam.
After the cable man left, I conducted an FCSI (regular readers of Cat Sitter in the City know that stands for feline crime scene investigation) and questioned Mercury (pictured to the right), who proclaimed her innocence. I believed her. Mercury is a good girl.
Then I grilled her sister Sam (pictured to the left), who has a wild streak. She wouldn't admit anything, although she did make a crack about T watching The Simpsons and Family Guy when she could be paying attention to her cats.
The lesson to be learned here? If your cat thinks you watch too much television, he or she may very well chew through the cables that deliver signals to your television. So limit your television viewing, or at the very least choose programs that your cat will also enjoy.
Welcome Cat
Hi. I'm Client Nine Lives, and I reside in New York City. My cat sitter and I have play dates during the week. I sit on her lap, and she brushes me, then she runs around the apartment dragging a ball of twine, and I chase her. Don't judge. Your cat might like it, too. This is my cat sitter's blog, by the way. Unless otherwise noted, all of the cats pictured on this site are her clients. If I were you, I'd bookmark this site and visit often. As for my identity, I'd rather not go public at this point. I'm a rather private feline. That said, you can probably figure out who I am if you read this blog. Damn!