College, The Psychic Friends Network, and a Hysterical Cat

Or, Another One of Those Days…

This story is from when I’d just started college. Funny how a lot of these sorts of stories come from that part of life, isn’t it? Anyway, I was still living with my parents at the time, on account of how the college I was attending was one I’d sort of drifted into from high school, and it was in the area. Both of my parents worked, so I had the house to myself from when they left until I had to leave for my first class. At the time, my parents had three dogs, two horses, a pony, and six cats — they have about half an acre of property up in the hills with a cattle ranch behind them, so there was plenty of room for that many pets. One of the cats was named Fiona, who was a tiny little domestic longhair. She was very sweet, but definitely on the low end of the intelligence scale, and had a hard time making up her mind about things like going outside. Lots of cats do, but not so many of them seemed to forget what they were trying to decide before making a choice. Fiona did that a lot. She also had this strange habit of stealing paper, hiding it under furniture, and very carefully punching rows of holes in it. We never figured out why, but knowing Fiona, she might not have known either.

One semester, my first class was at 10am, with an English professor that was very big on attendance and punctuality. I’d gotten up around the same time as my parents, so I had some extra time and decided to take a bath rather than a shower. As I was soaking in the tub, the phone rang. Normally, I wouldn’t have paid any attention, because calls on the house line were almost never for me, and this was before everyone had a cell phone grafted to them at birth. However, my dad had recently been complaining about robocalls leaving ten minute messages on the answering machine, so I decided to at least check to see what the call was about. I got out and grabbed a towel, then went out to the answering machine to see who it is. It turned out that yep, it was a robocall, from some hotline like the Psychic Friends Network or one of the dozens of copies that were around at the time. Not a big deal, really, except that this was also before robocall machines could reliably tell if they’d reached an answering machine, so the message was still going and being recorded. Likewise, my parents’ answering machine wasn’t the sort that automatically stopped recording after a certain amount of time — it had half an hour of tape, and would keep recording until the other side hung up. Sometimes the stupid machine would stop taking messages entirely when it ran out of tape. Other times, it’d rewind to the beginning and start recording over earlier messages, and my dad was allergic to instruction manuals, so the family didn’t know how to change how the thing operated if we even could.

I was on good enough terms with my parents to want to be helpful, so I ended up poking at the machine a little to try to get it to stop recording. Didn’t have a lot of luck, but at least I tried.

While I was fiddling with the machine, I suddenly heard a splash, a loud yowling, and bunch of thumps, and the sound of running paws going through the house. I went back to the bathroom to find that my bath has acquired a mess of wet cat hair, as well as there being a newly-developed trail of water and more cat hair on the floor and a couple walls leading to the opposite side of the house. Apparently, Fiona had decided to jump into the tub for some reason, except that the tub was full of water, deep enough to be over her head. I imagine she then freaked out, launched herself out of the tub, and ran like a crazy thing through the house to hide under a couch from the evil tub that had ambushed her, bouncing off a couple walls along the way. Oh, and it was spring, so Fiona was shedding the winter coat she got which would almost double her apparent size; the shock had apparently caused the little fuzzball to lose a bunch of it all at once, leaving wet clumps of cat hair plastered to various things she’d bounced off of on her flight to the living room. Yeah, not just regular shedding.

I couldn’t leave Fiona freaked out like that — the last time something made her flip out, she stayed under the couch long enough to need to poop under there, and I didn’t want to leave the poor thing all hysterical either. I also couldn’t leave the water and wet cat hair everywhere. So I finished cleaning myself up as best I could with a tub full of cat hair, cleaned the hair out of the tub, and wiped up all the water and hair from the floor and walls. I spent at least ten minutes trying to coax Fiona out from under the couch before she finally came out, dried her off and calmed her down. After that, I was finally able to finish getting ready for class. Took a while, especially drying off a hysterical cat.

As can be imagined, I was rather late getting to my class. Late enough that the professor had already started giving her lecture, and as was her usual response to anyone that late, she invited me to explain why I was so tardy given that she’d so heavily stressed punctuality on the first day. I could make the case she was too hard on late students, but she was teaching a first year class at a state university, and not a prestigious one at that, and as she’d said, after thirty years teaching that class, she’d gotten tired of students who couldn’t be adult enough to arrive on time. Given some of the reasons tardy students had given, I could understand why she’d gotten frustrated. Naturally, the professor gave me a fair amount of grief over my lateness, then invited me to explain myself.

So I did. I prefaced it by saying she probably wasn’t going to believe me, but yes, I stood in front of the class and explained how I was late because of the Psychic Friends Network and a hysterical cat. I was sure to include enough details of the event to (I hoped) make it clear I wasn’t making anything up. After I finished, the professor looked at me for a moment, then told me she was giving me a pass on being late that day because she’d apparently once owned a cat like Fiona, down to the absurd amount of shedding, and that the story I told was the sort of thing one couldn’t make up.

Perhaps needless to say, when I moved out, Fiona didn’t come with me.