Bad Kitties

On Saturday night, I stayed out late, shaking my booty at a wild party and drinking myself silly.

No, wait. Sorry. I just lied compulsively there. Sometimes I like to pretend that I live that kind of life.

In fact what I did on Saturday evening was have dinner with my mother and then spend two hours working on setting up her new computer.

I don't recall it taking this long to get my own computer set up, even though it's almost exactly the same as my mom's. For some reason, my mom's setup process is stretching longer and longer, with glitches at every possible opportunity. First the internet connection wouldn't cooperate. After an hour on the phone with tech support I had it working, and then as soon as the technician got off the phone it started cutting out again. I also can't seem to get her .mac e-mail address to work, even though that should be easy as pie.

Throughout the process, things are slowed further by the presence of Stinker and The Dude, my mom's insane cats. All they want to do is get in the way and chew on wires and cables. The Dude was so intent on chomping through the phone cord that I had to put the help desk on hold while I booted him out of the room. No amount of taps on his nose would deter him from his chewing. Once he was locked out, he spent a long time trying to burrow under the door before finally ambling off to pull the weather-stripping off the bottom of my mom's front door.

A while later, Stinker asked to come in. I had been sitting for 15 minutes watching software updates download to the hard drive, so I was bored enough to consider letting him in. I thought he might be better-behaved than his brother. I thought he might want to sit and have his ears scritchy-scratched, or just snuggle on my lap. My hopes were ill-founded. He made a beeline for the tangle of cables under the desk and started eating the power cord. I pulled him away, and as soon as I let him go he went right back to it, as though that particular wire had an irresistible magnetic attraction for him. So Stinker got booted out too.

My mom said that these dopey cat-brothers don't respond to the disciplinary measures that have worked on all her past cats. Yelling at them just doesn't register. You can push their faces away from the "no" object as many times as you like, and they'll just come straight back. Even a whack on the nose or the rump doesn't faze them. They just shake it off. (Of course they never get swatted hard enough to cause pain. It's supposed to piss them off, nothing more. But these cats are too easygoing. It's impossible to piss them off.) My mom tries to have a water mister handy to spritz them when they're bad, but she can't always have it in her hand, and there are some places (like near electrical equipment) that a mister isn't practical.

I advised my mom to get a taser. She's thinking about it.