/dev/random: Work and Pets.

Two things from recent surveys and the like seen around the list.

1. Do you enjoy your work? The work part of it, what people generally think of as my work, yes. There's a lot of other things that come with the work that I'm a lot less fond of.


2. Are you underpaid or overpaid for the work you do (or last did)? I'm drastically underpaid for the work I'm doing if you compare me to what people in the more affluent areas around me make, and I'm vastly overpaid compared to the less affluent places around me. One of the joys of being an institution primarily funded by local taxation rates.


3. What one thing do you dislike the most about your work? That I work in an institution and profession that steers with the speed of glaciers, and even now declares that the ideas of white supremacists are to be protected over the lives and experiences of marginalized people.


4. What one thing would make your work life happier or more satisfying? To have an administration that listens when people bring complaints and concerns about he institution or the profession more generally, and then actually does something productive quickly after having listened to those concerns.


5. Do you try to fit into your workplace's culture? What does that entail? That is a fantastic question. I have to fit into the workplace's culture, at least to some degree, or I'll get fired. My workplace's culture says that you help people find what they are looking for, even if you don't personally agree with them, and even if you think what they're looking for might actively hurt someone else if they get it. You can mitigate that somewhat by using other culture ideas, like gracious exits and insisting that someone only get accurate information, but there's a lot of library culture that's warped in favor of people who think they're intellectually above it all, rather than recognizing the real harms that those attitudes can bring (and have brought) out.

----

1. How many/what kind of pets do you have? I have one cat, currently, but the menagerie that I have had in the past has been at a maximum of two dogs (both cocker spaniel-shih tzu mixes) and five cats (all domestic shorthairs, colored as a black-greytabby, a calico, a blue, a black, and a white-orange tabby).


2. Names? She is often referred to as catling, kitten-child, Zed-Kitten, cat!, and many other things, sometimes more than her actual name.


3. How old are they? She's nine years and change at this point.


4. How did you get your pets? All of my cats and dogs have been rescues or wanderers that have come into the yard and been adopted. This particular cat was in a house being used as a cat rescue space, as one of a group of twenty or thirty that live in there and hope that someone will come in and adopt them. What I remember is that I reached out to pet her, testing to see if she would be compatible, and she batted at my hand and hissed at me. Which was a pretty solid disqualification, in my case, because I want my cats to actually like me. What I am told by others, however, is that after having pet the cat, she started to follow me around the rest of the house, as I was examining the other possible cats to adopt. I didn't realize this, because I am generally unobservant.
   
   While I was in the room where the cats that needed extra quiet and adjustment, and trying to decide whether or not to adopt one names Sabre and mulling whether or not she would adjust well to a house with one cat (at the time, I had lost one of a brother-sister team and was looking for a play companion for the surviving sibling) and the two dogs, a blue marched her way up the stairs, into the room, and jumped onto my lap and began to demand petting. I took this as the sign that this was the cat who I should adopt. And she has always been "my cat" since, in that she would growl and lash out at my terrible ex. She's the only cat that I took with me when I had to flee the relationship, and so now she's the only cat in the house. She's a lot happier being the only cat in the house, and I think I'm mostly a one, maybe two, cat-speed person.


5. Was it love at first sight? For her, apparently, yes. For me, I love her dearly, but she's got behavior issues that can be a great annoyance.


6. What makes your pet one of a kind? She's a cat - declawed in the front from a previous person, prone to leaving hairballs in inconvenient places, and she's extremely food-insecure. She yells at me to feed her starting well before it's time to feed her and doesn't stop until she's been fed. She has developed a taste for butter, bread, and the powder left behind in chip or cheese snack bags. I need to use top-loader litterboxes for her because she tends to want to urinate high, rather than into the litter. She yells at me if there's not a chest/torso for her to knead on when it's time to go to sleep at night, not that she actually stays there all night. None of these things make her unique by themselves, but all together, it makes the cat that I've been sharing my life with.


7. What is your absolute favorite thing about your pets? For as much as I complain about her getting in my way or that I have to wait for her to jump on me before I can get to sleep, the thing I like best about having her is that she's a companion and she's there when I need something to pet after a terrible day.


8. What's the funniest thing your pets have ever done? There is a certain joy in watching a cat exercise their instincts to chase a red-dot toy, even when the red dot starts to climb a wall, and the full-steam-ahead cat jumps up to try and get that dot as it traels up the wall. She also fits into some very interesting spaces and boxes.


9. What's the naughtiest thing your pet has ever done? She eats foodstuffs that she should not. She gnaws on power cords when she's stressed or pissed at me about something, which makes me upset with her and scared for her, because I don't want electric charge running through her.
   
   I wouldn't necessarily call it naughty, because it was justified, but she knocked one of her food dishes all the way down the stairs and to the water heater while I was away for a day or two. I had forgotten to put batteries in it so that it would pop open at the appropriate time. She knows there's food in there. And she tries very hard to defeat anything that gets in her way. (She's known as "Hacker-Kitty" for the fact that she defeated more than a few electric feeders before we found models that she couldn't get open through paw strength.) So, it was disconcerting to see where the feeder had ended up. But also props to its construction, as being knocked down the stairs didn't compromise the feeder or the food inside.


10. Please tell your pet I love them, because it's true. I will, but she's yelling at me to feed her again, so it might have to wait until afterward.