The ballad of Office Cat
One day last year at work my friend Emily and I heard a rather insistent mewing sound coming from the front door. And by insistent, I mean that we work upstairs and could still hear it. When we went to investigate, we found this:
As soon as we opened the door the cat trotted in, happy as you like, meowing all the time and rubbing up against us to say hello. After a while, and since we had to get back to work, we coaxed it back outside and regretfully headed back upstairs.
Except things didn’t end there. A couple of days later, the cat appeared again. And again the day after that. It started to jump through the downstairs windows whenever they were left open in order to explore the office and had to be chased out when it stomped over the keyboards in accounting. At lunch time, if you went outside it’d run up to you in greeting, or sleep in your lap…
Over time, it learnt when to turn up. I’d arrive each day at ten to nine in the morning to find it waiting at the door, nose pressed against the glass. It started to demonstrate better timekeeping than some of the employees. When we let it in, it’d immediately prance upstairs to the production office, which it would carefully explore to see what had changed from the last time it had visited. All this time the cat would be purring and kneading the floor with its front paws so much that it looked like it was on a rocking boat in a stormy sea. After exploration time to check that everything was to its liking, the cat would usually curl up asleep in the empty chair behind me for the rest of the day:
Inevitably, the cat got a name - dubbed Pushkin by our editor. It was evident Pushkin had a home; usually at around half four she would wake up, stretch, and paw at the door to be let out. On a couple of occasions she’d come in having had flea drops put behind her neck, so someone must have been taking care of her – there are houses behind the office which we suspect she came from. We were careful never to feed her, except for the time she pulled a packet of old, stale pitta bread from a bin and delicately munched away the soft upper side of one.
Pushkin was smart too – I was usually the one to let her out when I noticed her scratching at the door from the production office to the stairs. So she figured that she could pretend to stand there so that as soon as I stood up and walked over to open the door, she ran behind me, jumped up on my chair and curled up in a nice warm spot rather than her usual colder throne. I had officially been outwitted by a cat.
She brought tremendous enjoyment to everyone in the office – staff from downstairs would come up especially to see her and to watch her twitching in her chair as she dreamt the day away. Any deadline stress could instantly be cured by a few moments stroking Pushkin. She once spent half an hour sitting on my desk, her nose resting on my wrist, intently watching the mouse cursor dart around the screen as I laid out pages for the magazine. We (okay, I) even built her a castle from a Mac shipping box. You can’t see here the windows and nameplate that were added later:
Unfortunately, as I write this we’ll be heading into the fourth week without any sign of Pushkin. The office feels emptier without her. I hope that the reason she’s disappeared is benign – maybe her owners have moved away, or she’s found another place in which to while away the hours. Perhaps there’s another office in Chelmsford that is having their day brightened by a friendly furry visitor. But there’s a lot of traffic in the area, so I can’t help but fear the worst.
You never know, though; maybe one day when I turn into the courtyard at my workplace in the morning, she’ll be sitting there waiting. We’re certainly going to keep the job free for her.