We’re having a bit of a staffing crisis in our working from home office at present. You may remember that following the death of our first office manager Jango in May this year, Flipper took up the post. It was a rather left field appointment however she’s worked surprisingly hard and with dedication, sometimes working well into the night and sleeping at her desk.
She’s become so much of a fixture that colleagues expect her to be present at meetings, and clients have even asked after her by name.
So it was a shock last week when she suddenly didn’t turn in to work one morning. I found her sitting downstairs in Henderson’s favourite igloo. That’s a whole other issue which needs to be dealt with outside of work. Long and short of it is that I washed the igloo, and maintain that I did this with good reason, however it’s upset the whole eco system of the house. Despite it having been one of Henderson’s favourite hang outs, second only to the heat pad on the sofa, he now refuses to set foot in it. Turf wars between Rowan and Flipper have ensued. Anyway, I digress. She claimed to be off sick with hairballs.
The following day she was simply absent. She didn’t call in sick, she just wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the igloo, or on her perch in the bedroom window, or out in the garden, or nudging Hendo off his heat pad on the sofa. She wasn’t on the shelf near the treats waiting hopefully, she wasn’t on the bed with Honey. She wasn’t even under the bed, which is favourite spot for coughing up hair balls. I’m not sure what made me think to open the wardrobe door … but …
To be fair, she’s aways had a bit of a thing about wardrobes. I put it down to us watching The Lion the witch and the wardrobe when she was a kitten. If I leave the door open she’s in there dreaming of Narnia. When I raised the issue of work she simply said she didn’t want to. I reminded her of the number of days I’d said that I didn’t really want to go to work, but had gone anyway. She couldn’t get her fluffy head around why on earth anyone would do something they didn’t want to do. Anyway, she said, she’d been to work nearly a hundred times now and was getting bored with it. I began trying to work out how many hundred times I’d been to work since starting in the early 1980s … but quickly realised the futility of this.
Obviously we then had to get cover in at short notice. No one felt able to cover a full shift, so it was a bit of a patchwork. Henderson put in a couple of hours, snuggled on my lap so I couldn’t move to reach anything.
Henderson
Rowan came in later but unilaterally declared it was “bring your kitten to work” day. He then crashed out in his nest, leaving his kitten to run riot around the office.
There were limited options after that. Kevin & Dasher were engaged in re enacting scenes from DH Lawrence
Dasher & Kevin
Rolo and Amber were in the garden doing semi feral things.
Honey, being “extremely upper management” was hardly going to drop everything to cover a shift at short notice.
Honey
So we were left with the only option of calling in a temp. Becky had only been with us a few days and had mainy been self isolating in her bedroom. [Unbeknown to us at that time she’d been struggling with gender issues … or at least our perception of them ….. and later that day revealed herself to be a boy cat …. and changed her name to Beckett … but again I digress]
S/he wasn’t entirely pleased to be pulled away from her nap
Becky / Beckett
and didn’t really understand anything about the job or what she needed to do. However she set about trying to organise my diary
took over supervising Rowan’s kitten
and then gave him a telling off for his negligence
The situation will need to be discussed with Flipper ahead of her appraisal. Her behaviour may have scuppered her chances of promotion to extremely upper management. It may even result in disciplinary proceedings. Take a guess at how bovvvered she is by this.
8 Lives: Sheffield 8 Cat Rescue 