Rent-a-Cat

Yesterday, over at The Litterbox Jen came up with a perfect money-making scheme: She is going to rent out her cats!

The idea wouldn't be nearly so funny to me, except it reminded me of a time when My Little Chinese Guy approached me about doing almost that very same thing.

I have mentioned My Little Chinese Guy before. While in most respects he was a sweet guy and we had some very interesting and stimulating conversations, in some ways I found him a little eccentric. I never figured out why he thought he needed to give me a watermelon or why he preferred the bathrooms near my office, but the day that he softly knocked on my office door and politely asked if he could borrow one of my cats for a few days really took the cake.

At first I blinked a couple of times and shook my head as if to clear the cotton out of my ears. It had been one of those days where I had been staring too long and too hard at the computer screen and I thought maybe I hadn't heard him correctly. "Excuse me?" I said. He repeated his request to borrow one of my cats. "Why?" I asked, a little suspicious. He always seemed to like my cats, even though he was one of those people who was a little over-anxious around them.

Then story the came out. He lived in a little house and apparently, a rat had decided to move in with him. It was eating his bread and leaving turds all over the house. "A rat?" I asked, "Are you sure it isn't just a mouse?" No, he was convinced it was a rat, and a damned clever one at that. Up to that point, it had apparently avoided all of the traps he had set out. I suggested poison. He explained he didn't want to use poison when he though a cat would do nicely to catch the thing. This, he explained, was the reason for his visit. I was the only person he knew that had a cat.

He thought since Scooter was such a big tomcat, he would be the perfect rat-hunter and promised that he would take good care of him if I would loan him to him for a few days... just until he caught the rat.

When I tried to picture Scooter hunting a rat, I laughed out loud. I tried to explain to him that Scooter was a pampered indoor house cat who had never even smelled a rat. I wasn't even sure he would know what to do if he saw one. That was the problem, said my Little Chinese Guy. Scooter needed some experience in being a cat. He should be outdoors hunting. This would give him the perfect opportunity to tune into his instinct. "No," I said, "You are not borrowing my cat."

He then tried to convince me maybe Mouse would be better equipped for the task. After all, he said, it appeared to him that she had the right attitude for it. While I agreed Mouse would probably make a better rat-hunter, I held firm and would not let him borrow my cats. Crestfallen, he finally gave up. He told me to have a nice day and left my office.

I never did find out what happened to that rat...