Uh oh. I just looked at my appointment calendar, and I’ve got Candice Merriman’s labrador written in for after lunch. I’d forgotten about that. I now remember pencilling it in last Thursday, with some reluctance. After our last session, I vowed I’d think hard about working with Candice again, and secretly hoped the whole thing would fizzle out. But then she called me while I was having a tense moment ushering Kirsten Harold’s horse in through the front door, and I wrote it in without a moment’s thought.

 

Anyway, here we are. I suppose this means I’ll be spending my lunch break cleaning the bathroom. You see, Candice Merriman is an incredible stickler for cleanliness. This became apparent when she went off at me about the bathrooms during her last visit. Honestly, it was a power trip if ever I saw one. Apparently, she wasn’t paying $200 per hour for Caroline (the labrador) to endure toileting in a space another animal had just been in.

 

I tried to reason with Candice that this is kind of what dogs do, and that most of our clients actually just go outside anyway. The bathroom is really just for show (I always ask that humans use the public toilets down the road, for sanitary reasons). Caroline, for one, didn’t seem particularly fussed about it.

 

I mean, sure. It just so happened that that day, a near-sighted chihuahua had left a tiny puddle on the floor, which was the cause of Candice’s ire. Still, there’s no need to yell about it, especially when I’ve gone to the very great effort of installing custom bathrooms designed specifically for the needs of my valued four-legged clients. Does she think it’s easy to get pet-friendly bathroom renovations for Melbourne offices?

 

Finding a bathroom installation company willing to do the project was hard enough, let alone ironing out issues like how to get stray puddles to drain away, which is what would have happened in this case had Candice just given it a minute. That’s the problem with people these days: they expect everything to be immediate. And yet, here I am pandering that expectation. The things you do!