This morning I awoke bright and early at 5:30am for a 6am conference call with a customer with offices in Germany and the UK. Of course, there are inevitably network and technology problems whenever something important like that is scheduled to occur. I wasn’t the one who was leading the meeting, but still, it doesn’t look good in the eyes of the customer when a big meeting has to be rescheduled due to technical difficulties.
Yesterday while embarking on a walk on the Treasure Island perimeter path with Jen, Stella, and Shannon, there was a stressful dog altercation. Stella’s friend Beppo was running around off-leash and came up to greet Stella. No worries. Stella was on leash, but she and Beppo get along great. Upon approaching the path, we saw some guy and an off-leash dog. All too many times, Stella (usually on leash) is jumped by other off-leash dogs. So my new policy is to take her off leash whenever an off-leash dog she doesn’t know approaches (which is only fair). So I took her off leash and she and Beppo began to run toward the other dog. Right when this happened, the guy puts his dog on a choke collar. Stella and Beppo charge the other dog, and the dumbass owner begins to lift his dog up in the air by the neck with the choke chain, kicking at Beppo and Stella. Stella mostly circled and Beppo was doing the attacking, but this idiot guy who claimed to “train dogs for a living” was literally choking his dog, making the situation a great deal worse than it had to be. If people would just let go of dogs and let them work it out, it wouldn’t be so bad. Of course, if I had known this asshole was going to put his dog back on leash, I wouldn’t have let Stella go, either.
The humans are always more traumatized and upset by dog altercations than are the canines. Stella was over it just minutes after it happened.
