At some point in time, I would like to tell a story in which I am not at odds with others. Since my boss, Tonya Harding, told me yesterday that she had to “twist a lot of arms” to get me hired at EduTech because of all of the “bad blood,” I have no hope that this situation will occur anytime soon. I swear, I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. I thought I was a ray of sunshine.
On to the story: As my intrepid reader recalls, I acquired a very thin, very pregnant Boxer
who picked up the name Sweety Pie in spite of the fact that she regularly tried to eat Katy. I found SP the day after I was laid off from my job. She promptly gave birth to nine (9) puppies.
These puppies helped ease the pain and trauma of losing one’s job in spite of the fact that I am/was pretty good at it. So for the next 8 weeks, I helped Pie raise her babies. She was good at feeding them,
but was not terribly affectionate or nurturing, so there was plenty to keep me engaged. They were in the house in a plastic baby sandbox for two weeks, but then became too mobile to be safe (due to wires and various doodads that could topple), so I moved the whole crew out to the converted garage (converted by high school students in the 70s to some kind of swinging pad), where they lived and grew for a few more weeks. I developed a protocol: I bought about a dozen disposable painting drop cloths and stapled them to the floor; then I made nests in the room and left several bowls of a stew of puppy formula, dry puppy chow, and canned puppy food. The babies would dive into ONE of the bowls of food ins spite of the fact that there were three bowls available. They would pile on top of one another and gobble and squabble, then move en masse to another bowl. Then, after the post-meal pooping occurred, I would peel up one layer of drop cloth, leaving a clean surface behind. This cycle of drop cloths was repeated about every 3 – 4 days. At first, the babies were too small to clamber up the single step up into the room so the greggers suggested we build a little set of steps with old bricks. That worked.
So they ate and they grew. This is what the first two looked like.
there were many more. So I spent a lot of time with these babies and really wanted to keep all of them (impractical). I did my best to find them good homes. In some cases, I succeeded (or, rather, the puppies succeeded). This is Rita
on the day she went home with Bob. Then later, she looked more like this:
Familiar? So Rita was a success story. So was Princess Buttercup. I’m pretty sure PeeWee and Moose are OK, too. But when you have to find homes for 9 puppies, you exhaust your own resources and turn to friends and acquaintances to put the word out. That is how Sugar Ray was placed.
Someone knew someone that I used to work with, and her brother wanted a puppy, and I talked to him, and he swore to me that he would give Sugar Ray a good home. He told me that he would have Sugar Ray neutered. He said that if he ever had any problems with the dog, he would call me first so I could help solve the problem or find him a new home, if necessary. Yes, yes, yes. It was all good. What I didn’t know is that his actual intention was to give the puppy to his girlfriend, whom I had never met. So with that bit of foreshadowing, life went on. I found homes for all of the puppies (Molly had already found her own home right here) and Sweety Pie (another long story). I was hired at EduTech. In the small world in which I work, we all know each other. It turns out that the brother-in-law of the guy who adopted Sugar Ray also worked there — another casualty of the EduMart purge. I talked to him regularly about Sugar Ray, who had been renamed with the ultra-mega-gay name of Bennett. He assured me that he was doing well, that he was getting really big, that he was loved. Yay. I felt that it was a successful match. I still didn’t know that the dog was actually with the girlfriend.
Then one day, I got a forwarded email from the sister of the guy who adopted Sugar Ray. She was desperately trying to find a home for a six-month-old Boxer mix. She had expressly asked several people NOT to tell me or anyone else who might tell me that this dog needed a home. The email was already a couple of days old, so I didn’t know what the current situation was. I did what I thought was reasonable and asked my colleague what was going on. When cornered, he admitted to me that “someone” had taken the puppy to the pound, but he didn’t know when. I pretended to be nice for a while in order to get information from these asshole people. I asked when he had been taken there, why, and who had surrendered him. It took about a day to gather all of the information. I took off early from work to go to the pound to adopt Sugar Ray. I couldn’t find him there. I walked up and down row after row after row of dogs and puppies, all begging for attention, hiding from attention, or terrified by my attention. There were two warehouses full of strays that had been picked up by animal control officers. I walked through the area full of adoptable dogs. The records system at the pound had recently been overhauled, rendering it useless. They promised to call me the next day after tracking down the records. I still held out hope that the sweet, beautiful creature I had entrusted to these people was still there and I could save him.
The next morning, as promised, the clerk from the city pound called me back to tell me that Sugar Ray had been euthanised the day after he was surrendered. The people who brought him in had said that he was aggressive and that they thought he had neurological problems. They really had no choice, what with the overcrowding and all. What with the dozens and dozens and dozens of dogs packed into kennels and runs and cages.
So, yes, I am small and petty and I sent an email to the parties involved: the coworker who told me over andover again that Sugar Ray was doing well and had a good home, his retarded wife, her mother (aside: this is how stupid this woman is: she had NO IDEA that forwarding an email to me and OTHER RECIPIENTS would reveal their email addresses to me). One of the excuses that the female cretin made: If I am so very attached to puppies that I raise (like it was my choice), then I shouldn’t try to find homes for them — I should keep them all. I am still devastated by the fact that I trusted idiots. I still work with one of these idiots. I see him every day, hanging around with morons (really, the stupidest group of people I’ve ever been near). He has clearly told them all about my angry tirades in email form, and about how unreasonable I am. They all give me the stinkeye now. It’s like being rejected by Skut Farkas. Who gives a rat’s ass. Has he told them that he was a party to the killing of a 7-month-old puppy? Did he tell them that he lied to me about the puppy? That I would happily have the puppy here right now to save him? I doubt it.
So, back to the wedding. Recently an acquaintance and former coworker got married. Because she is afraid of offending anyone even though she knew the whole story, she invited both the evil people and me and the greggers to her wedding. I suspected they would be there. We witnessed the ceremony, then enjoyed the reception. They left shortly after they saw us, suspecting (rightly) that the anger over a dead puppy takes a long time to dissipate.
