Why You Never Ask the Designers For a Favor 238
Usually there is nothing funny about a missing pet, but the tale of Missy the lost cat is hilarious. It serves as an example of just how clueless your fellow employees can be, and why you should never ask the designers to drop what they're doing, and help with a personal matter.
Re:Obviously fake (Score:3, Interesting)
"This is the only photo of her I have she answers to the name Missy and is black and white and about 8 months old."
Cats don't answer to names.
While I'm sure you're joking, cats actually do tend to respond well to sibilant names. So in this case, "Missy" is a name a cat is likely to respond to.
Googling around at work didn't yield any articles that were both in support of my claim and cited other sources, so you'll have to perform the research yourself. I've had many cats over the years, and this seems like a reasonable observation to me. A good relationship with your cat and reasonable training usually means the cat will respond to whatever its name is, but a lot of this has to do with the cat recognizing the owner's voice, more than the actual sound the human voice is making. Much of human-range languaging phonetics are sophisticated enough that both cats and dogs are largely in the dark about them. (See Levin, 2007 [amazon.com] for more on that.)
Re:Obviously fake (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, both dogs and cats have shown to respond to rather large human vocabularies. The average dog, on average, is smarter than the average cat. Just the same there are plentiful examples of the smarter than average dog or cat be considerably more so. Furthermore, recent research indicates the average dog is smarter than a three year old human and cats somewhere around a two year old.
Even a visit to YouTube can show you that not only do cats hear phonetics, its possible for them to push their vocal range to the limits in an attempt to mimic the phonetic range possible by the human voice. In short, dogs, cats, and many species of birds have all shown a high aptitude for both learning and comprehending human speech. As like many young humans, they often lack clarity of context. Regardless, recognition and comprehension of their name is a skill which is exceedingly common amongst these animals. In fact, all of these animals can have human vocabularies ranging up to the thousands.
Generally when people have dumb pets its because the pet has dumb owners who in turn treat their pet as a dumb pet. Not hardly surprising. Oddly enough, the results are much the same for human children. Again, not surprising.
One of the common mistakes people have about cats is that unlike dogs, they process a large amount of communication non-verbally. A competent combination of verbal and non-verbal communication with cats goes a great distance further than does the same combination with dogs. This in turn tends to cause additional confusion with humans because they often send mixed and confusing signals; those being both verbal and non-verbal.
Re:The guy is a nasty, vicious idiot. (Score:1, Interesting)
So, why did he waste over a day tormenting the owner of the missing cat?
Because she will never ask him to do anything every again... Thus.. a day spent tormenting her saves several more in time that he won't have to do other "little projects"
Sometimes you do (Score:2, Interesting)
Just 3 words in the headline big (a short description of the cat in very very small type) and his phone number. LOOKING FOR PUSSY.
He got 10 angry phone calls in 20 minutes and got the cat in less than an hour - I shit you not. Effective advertising works.