How cats can enhance home office productivity

My cats contribute a lot to my work efficiency here in my home office. Seriously. Mind you they’re not always so good at the rodent control, as my late mother once raged while cleaning out our shared pantry one summer afternoon and spat out “five f***ing cats in this house and what do I find here? F***ing mouse sh*t…”

Well, souris à la Bedfordshire just doesn’t stack up against prime Whiskas; however my mum came from a country family where cats were cats. That evening she threatened mass felinocide and was only restrained from committing it by a large gin and tonic.

But in the office? They are ace. Here are some examples.

Prompt upgrading of equipment

Back in pre-email days I loved the fax machine because it was the only means of getting a document from my office to my client’s office without my having to heave my butt into the car and drive it there or pay a Darth Vader impersonator to whisk it over on a 200 m.p.h. motorcycle for a princely sum. All the same, by the time email came into play at a serious level the fax machine was not only nearly redundant but also big, old, wheezy, cranky and otherwise disagreeable.

Cue a cat to walk around on its horizontally laid out controls, curl up and try to go to sleep on them until the beeping and clunking were deafening. Cat jumped off, fax machine fried its own brains, so I put it in the garbage the next day and we all hopped neatly into the next generation of business communication.

Quick, effective dusting of desktop keyboard

Nothing like the feet of a long-haired cat to sweep all the dust and debris off your keyboard whilst walking around on it trying to get your attention! Works a treat, until they step on the “delete” key and you haven’t saved your document. Naughty puddytat needs to get the hell out of there before mom turns into a chainsaw murderer. But look on the bright side: the dusting is done.

Effective temperature control of scanner/printer

With their conveniently warm plastic tops, scanner/printers attract cats for one or more of their multiple daily siestas. This has the business benefit of channeling superfluous heat from the machine into a useful source, i.e. a cat, rather than it just being wafted away into the rest of the room.

Cats and printers can have somewhat adversarial relationships, however, as this priceless video explains…

A useful reminder of our connection with nature

All too often in a home office you can become obsessed with the online environment and IT generally. Nothing brings you back down to earth faster than a cat walking in with a mouse / bird / frog in its mouth and letting it go under your desk.

So refreshing and just the woo-woo diversion you need when you’re sweating blood to complete a project. Gets you out of that chair, into the kitchen to find something to catch the little b*gger with and then it’s 10 minutes of healthy exercise time while you try to beat the cats (and dogs) to that corner full of dust bunnies where the unfortunate creature is hiding. Catching a frog beats the pants off lifting weights or power-walking.

Helpful contributions towards your alimentary self-sufficiency

There’s nothing a cat likes better than to dig around in some freshly dug-around (by you) earth/soil. Without question, this procedure allows you to spend less valuable business time on preparing your garden for planting – or (later in the season) enhancing the weed control process and general irrigational issues.

Trouble is, when cats dig around in fresh earth/soil, they tend not to leave it at that. Nope. They poop in it, albeit with the grace to cover the poop up with some more of your carefully-tilled earth/soil.

The answer? Grow stuff in containers in which cats find it inappropriate – or downright impossible – to scratch, and poop. Instead, let them incubate your young plants as illustrated here on the right.

As I suggest, cats are potentially valuable contributors to our increasing productivity and business success.

Miaow.