Ya’ll my boss eats cat-food. He doesn’t really, but he and I sure spent a lot of time and effort making three of my nieces believe that he does.
I work at a taxidermy shop. We have all manner of dead things there at any given time. I do what I can to help, but my boss is an artist with his work. We have a saying here that he can fix almost any of my mistakes. I have put this logic to the test quite a few times. Anytime I’m not sure that it will hold, I try to do any moderately reasonable thing to make it look like someone else messed up and not me. Don’t judge me, sometimes in survival of the fittest, things take a greyer shade in a blink of an eye. This is true for co-workers but most certainly when your family is your co-workers. See, at different times, I have had a nephew and 3 nieces work with me there. We have a great time.
As I mentioned before, there are all manner of dead animals at work. We work very hard to keep it clean; you would be hard-pressed to find a cleaner shop like this anywhere. But dead animals are around, this is a fact of life I have gotten used to. Sometimes things smell. Sometimes they are bloody. Sometimes people forget that other people have to work on their animals, and simply do not freeze their trophy for days before bringing them into the shop. For these and many other reasons, we have to be diligent at keeping raccoons and possums away. They see our shop as smorgasbord of food; we are irresistible to them. I can’t lie though; sometimes it does feel good to feel wanted, for once. (Sorry, sometimes the sadness bleeds through my fingers, and I forget what I am writing about. I promise it’s not that bad ya’ll.)
Anyway, we trap and re-home these little critters on a weekly basis, and we use cat-food to lure them in. As much as they love the meat our shop seems to unintentionally provide, they cannot say no to cat-food. Well, my nieces had seen the cat-food around the shop and would mention something about it. My boss would casually say that it was his last snack or something like that. They would smile and just kind of try to figure out exactly what was going on.
My plan and goal was to drive home exactly what was going on: “Ladies, our boss, the man we love and whom is like family to us has a serious addiction to cat-food.”
It started with a video that he was in on (posted below). In it, we took a can of cat-food and gave him a fork that had something that wasn’t cat-food on it. Then, he proceeded to really enjoy what he was eating as I made a short, commentaried video where I whispered, acted like I had ninja-snuck-up on him, and caught him in the act of enjoying his cat-food. They were shocked!!!
I waited a couple of days to let the video really set-in. We talked about it a couple of times and decided to just wait and make sure that he really did have a cat-food eating problem before we planned our intervention. So two days later I was in the back of the shop and sent them a picture of a half-gone can of cat-food. I acted like I had just found it there, a place it had no business being . I knew now that they would believe that there was, in fact, such a thing as cat-food addiction.
They worked the following day, and what do ya know? In the refrigerator, that we all use on a daily basis, happened to be a half-eaten can of cat-food. Shocking, I know. Well, this was it! My middle niece is absolutely one of my favorite people in the world. The thing about her, and she doesn’t even know it yet, but she really cares. As humans, we become desensitized by the bad things in the world and can become cynical, and eventually apathetic. I’d like to be more like her. If she can keep caring like she does, the whole world is right at her finger-tips, but this day was not the day to care. With tears welling up in her eyes, she came and asked where the cat-food came from.
Right on cue, my boss said, “Well, the thing is, cat-food really does taste pretty good”….
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