Tuesday, October 30, 2012

My First Pet

First of all, best wishes to all of you East Coasters - does anyone think it's ironic that a hurricane named Sandy washed out so many beaches?  OK, OK, not funny.

Yesterday I received an email that a paycheck had been deposited in my bank account.  Whoopee!  I loooove money!  It had a link to use to go see how many millions of dollars had been deposited (a girl can dream).  I clicked on the link and the website asked me to log in.

Hmmm.  This was the first paycheck I was receiving from this company.  I don't remember creating a login or password.  Hmmmm.  Well, tech wizard that I am, I decided to click on "forgot your login ID?" and see what happened.  It asked me for my email address.  Ha, I thought, this is where I'll get the message that "no account exists for this email address."  But no, it told me to rush to my Inbox where a friendly message about my login ID awaited me.

And yes!  There it was.  But I totally did not recognize that login ID.  Hmmm again.  Then I started thinking this was spam.  So I asked someone else who gets paid by the same company and she confirmed it was for real.

OK, so I went back to the site and typed in the login ID I had apparently created, although I was feeling less optimistic.  Then I clicked on "forgot my password."  A new screen appeared asking me a security question.  "What was the name of your first pet?"

Well, there's a progress stopper for ya.  I would never have created that security question.  Time to write to the company and ask for help.

But this put me in mind of the fact that I did, indeed, have a first pet and I'd like to share his or her story with you.  Ready?  I doubt it.

When I was 4, I asked my parents for a dog.  "No way" was the response.  My parents were kind and caring people, and I don't think they wanted to deny me of a precious pet, rather I think that having a butcher shop with fresh meat in the same building as a dog (we lived upstairs from the butcher shop) was probably a baaaaaaaad idea.

So, because I was a very persistent child (read stubborn and kinda spoiled, 3rd girl of 3 and all that, and awfully cute if I do say so myself), they finally gave in and bought me and my sisters a parakeet.  I don't remember what we named it, but I remember it was green.  Or blue.  Or yellow.

We were very excited about our pet - it chirped its head off most of the day (oh, not annoying at all) and our wonderful, patient housekeeper Milly of course ended up being the one who had to change its cage-paper.

One day (cue the dun dun DUN music) the bird escaped while Milly was changing the paper.  She or he (the bird, not Milly) flew around in a crazed manner and we all tried to catch it.  Milly finally caught it and handed it to me while she fixed up the cage.  (Cue music of doom again).  I decided this was a good time to give the birdie a bath.

I took it into the powder room and turned on the water.  Can you see where this is going?  It tried to fly away so I held it.  Tight.  Really tight.  Oops.

Let's just say that I have never watched "The Birds" all the way through because I think one day our bird's extended family is going to come for me.

Tweeeeeet.....GAWK.

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