Pulling Teeth

Skipped yesterday's entry as I spent far too much time getting a product order ready and web surfing Dresden Files message boards looking for the latest conspiracy theories. Should have written something yesterday, but I think I'm getting alittle burnt out with work. Need a vacation. Need to veg.

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Met a homeowner today whose cats kept scratching at the screen door right in front of me while I was talking to her. I felt like I needed to start re-educating the cats right away. I'm about to sell her a new screen that is supposedly tear resistant. However, if she leaves her cats in front of the screen and encourages them to sit there with a stool, then any screen is just going to become part of the cats' entertainment regimen and get shredded rather quickly. The screen door becomes a source of fresh air, visual entertainment as squirrels and people scamper by, their extra large stretching post, and my favorite, a kitty climbing wall.

Of course when I stepped inside the house, the cats started rubbing themselves on me to seduce me into the church of cat. These little pets are just irredeemable while being their cute selves. In reality, I needed to re-educate the cat owner.

Her name is Sherilyn. She's an older gentlelady, retired from teaching. Now living alone in the Bayfarm island of Alameda. One of the first things she tells me is that she is resentful of her friend for giving her two kittens last summer. Now the little kittens have grown into their teenage years and are flat out hooligans, with little leather jackets, cigarettes in their ears and just getting into all kinds of mischief.

She related the story about the black and white cat named Felix. Felix climbed up the screen door, lept to the top of the entry door and then lept to the glass bookcase on the adjacent wall. When it landed there, the glass shelf snapped and the load tumbled down taking out another shelf.

Sherilyn saw me smile and shake my head. "That wasn't bad at all! Last Christmas, I woke up and heard the other cat screaming. Turns out he climbed up my artificial tree, fell off but caught his leg in the wiring. His leg was all tangled up in wiring and he was screaming at the top of his lungs. I thought he broke his leg! I started screaming and ran into the kitchen to get a knife to cut the wiring. He was bucking and caterwauling so badly, that I broke the knife in two while I was sawing away at the wire. I went back to the kitchen, got a second knife and went back at it. This time, he latched on to me. While I'm pulling him towards me, the tangled wires pull the tree down on top of us. I screamed and this little shit bites my arm a good one! I ended up going to the emergency room that evening to get stitches and shots. The little shit escapes from the cat carrier and a security guard corrals him back into it. The hospital does not have a vet on staff at midnight and animals aren't supposed to be loose in the emergency waiting room. So the guard duct taped the carrier shut. The next morning, I took him to the vet and x-rays show he doesn't have any broken bones. He's fine and I have stitches and a thrashed living room."

I can only shake my head at this. Really, why do you still have cats? I think to myself. I try to spend a few minutes talking about maybe moving the stool away from the door, and a few other behavior modifications she as an owner should think about.

* *

Yesterday I met my first or second private investigator.

I pulled up to his house and tried to back up his driveway to get a little bit of shade. I even picked the center of the three car wide driveway to get the roof peak shade shining directly down. However, I had a 96" screen door sticking out of the pickup bed, and I just didn't want to risk backing into his garage door with it. I could see just the top two feet of the door get shade, but the panels on the garage door seemed too big in the rearview mirror. So I aborted the attempt. Luckily I saw some tree shade directly accross the street and pulled into that spot instead.

When I got out of my truck, I was shocked to see him standing in the driveway waving at me. I didn't notice him in any of my mirrors. He just sort of appeared when I got out of my truck. I approached after getting my new customer tools together (putty knife, sample door, business cards, measuring tape, and blank work order).

"Why didn't you park in the driveway son?"

It didn't look like I was getting much shade and I fulfilled my lifetime quota on backing into closed garage doors. One and done on that.

He smiled and shook his head. I asked how did hew know I was here?

"Oh I was reviewing surveillance footage and I saw you pull into the driveway."

Reviewing footage? He tells me about his profession. Did he apprentice under another PI? No, he is a retired San Pablo police officer. Now he is doing fraud investigations for worker's comp claims. He also does following of cheating spouses and almost anything else people call him for. He runs multiple cases at once, using other retired cops to help surveil. He gets $650 a day and pays them $300 as sub contractors. In January, that would be some good money for me!


We chit chat alittle bit, and I make a mental note about interviewing him again when I have more time than clients. We went around back to look at the work he wanted done. He tells me about his two dogs both blowing out their ACLs from chasing squirrels in the backyard. When the dogs went after this critter, they blew through two different screen doors, scrambled over hardwood decking and their ligaments just popped. $6,000 worth of vet bills later, he decided to get rid of the squirrel feeder in his backyard.

That's a lot of surveillance footage to review.