January 12, 2006
Curious George
I guess anyone who owns or is owned by one knows that they run the household and anybody who has shared with a cat knows that reading a newspaper is impossible! You can only read the bits in the paper that the cat doesn't lie on - has anybody elses feline (or other pet) adapted to the computer thing - i mean my personal feline hell now knows exactly where to lie so the optical mouse doesn't work - oh or how to 'help' me type if she feels so inclined (and no distractions of favourite toy etc do not work!)
Curious really just want to know if any other pets apart from cats have learnt 'distraction' habits and what are they?
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One of my two cats always wants to be given attention when I'm on my home PC, and will stand infront of the screen, mewl and walk on the keyboard en-route to my lap. I think she gets jealous. So I throw her on the fire, she runs off, sets my house on fire and the whole scene unfolds with a numbing inevitability.
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I had just pressed command-A to highlight my paper when she came over and pressed delete.
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I live in a house full of typing cats/
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My cat doesn't try to type on the computer... but he does like to sleep in my chair at the computer... My cat's boring. :-(
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I have no idea why you people allow yourself to controlled by something that needs you for food and water.
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If you have enough cats, one day they will type the works of Shakespeare. Or they'll all start blogs and bitch about you.
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Why don't you let your cat read the classifieds while you read the front page? Scatter it on the floor, let her go nuts.
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Hah... try knitting! My cats are older (10 and 11) and have pretty much been broken from the newspaper/computer interference. But I took up knitting over the holidays, and that is proving to be an enticement they can't resist. My thighs are covered with little claw marks from sneak attacks on my yarn.
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My 16-year old kitty lays herself completely on the keyboard. If I move her, she'll come back. A thousand times if necessary. When I'm surfing it's ok because I can just use the mouse. She's little, but she's wiry, and she holds down the control key with her ass. She'll often launch a google search for dr6666wwwwwwwww////////////////////. I think that must be some sort of alien code.
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aw, this makes me miss my kitty :(
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Well, now that you mention it...
Yeah, they've pretty well figured the art of making sure we pay attention to them over the computer. (They've also managed to rename the hard drive of the Mac Mini. As is fitting for a cat, instead of the boring "Macintosh HD" that we left it as, it's now named "ZZZ")
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the bigger one of my two kitties (see my profile for super ultra adorable pics cause my kitties are cuter than anyone else's...) loves to lie between the keyboard and the monitor, while the smaller one loves to curl up around my neck on my shoulders... they are very good at getting attention when they want it, and yelling at me when they don't get it...
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Ha! Ha! /Nelson *gets chewed on by dog* Ow!
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Quote of the Day: "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function." --Unknown
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My cat is well-behaved at the computer. He will occasionally stand in between keyboard and monitor, but that is just a pause for petting as he moves from floor to desk to windowsill. On rare occasions he will sit in our laps and gently touch the spacebar, but usually if he's in the mood for attention he just does the drive-by "meow loudly, rub against the shins and then walk away" thing. If we aren't at the computer he will sit in our laps. Takes him the longest time to get comfy, and he usually bolts after five to ten minutes. (For the first three years of his life he was not a lap cat, and then suddenly discovered how warm and comfy our laps were. He's still working out the bugs.) My wife's cat is the weird one. His two favorite rooms are the bathroom and computer room, with the bedroom a very close third place. He will sit in the computer room and wait for us to come in there. He sleeps on the floor by my feet when I'm up late working on things (used to knock the cable modem offline all the time, due to a loose connection, until I upgraded the thing). He gets in our laps quite often, always likes to help touch the keyboard. He's a big fluffy pile of annoyingly cute cat. 15+ pounds of hair, basically. He will not sit on our laps in the living room. He used to, but for some reason he stopped doing it right around the same time that his brother started to do it. He will lurk in the bathroom and jump in my wife's lap when she is on the potty though. Really not sure why he does this. My wife's old cat wasn't such an attention hound, but she used to nip me on the chin gently when she wanted me to pet her. (She started doing this when I grew a beard. Never did it before. Odd.) We had an agreement about video games, too. I would provide her with a comfortable perch so long as she left the controller alone. Anyway, cats aren't the only critters with Human Distraction techniques. My old dog was a master of the "press head gently against knee and stare at you soulfully until you cave and pet me" method. That or "bring the owner something to play fetch with".
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One of our cats likes to sleep on top of the monitor. We are thinking about getting an LCD, but that might be cruel. In extreme cases he has decided to set up shop on top of someone's mouse hand, just because. Mind you, for sheer pay attention to me or else, nothing in my experience exceeds a cockatoo.
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My doggie likes to ignore me until it's time to get work done, then as soon as I fire up the computer he sits on the floor beside me and whines. He doesn't often whine like a dog, though. Instead, he's perfected the little kid "breathe soulfully in a way that lets everyone know that no one ever, ever pets me" kind of way.