Dog turds and clickbait are a match.
Follow my story.
Yesterday I was in Payson, the “big” town nearest me (~15,000 people, where there is a Home Depot, Walmart, Safeway, doctors, fast food, hospital, maybe one good coffee shop.
I had a string of appointments lined up.
There was one I could not schedule was for today. I got a card that Felix needed a shot and parasite test at the veterinarian. I had switched to a new one at his one year anniversary.
So one of my appointments went quicker than I thought, and I had 40 minutes before getting my truck in for an oil change / tire rotation at Big O. So I took Felix for a walk in the neighborhood around the hospital.
Right in front of the Mormon church adjacent to the hospital, Felix stopped and took a big dump right on their manicured bushes.
My dog crapped on a church.
In my wooded neighborhood, I usually leave his deposits to do their biological breakdown, but in more populated areas I try to be conscientious and carry a bag.
Except today.
I looked around.
Nobody there.
Still.
I should be a good citizen.
A lady called out from a car in the street.
“Do you have a bag?”
Busted.
“No, I will have to go back to my truck to get one. Do you have one?”
She shook her head no. Was she being snoopy or helpful?
So I walked back to my truck. I could just leave easily.
That’s lazy.
Then I remembered I needed a “sample” for Felix’s vet appointment, so it made sense to not only clean up, I could even walk over today and drop his stool sample off at the vet.
I got my bag and sample.
We walked to the vet office, and dropped the sample. They asked me if I wanted it to go out today, which meant I had to pay for it. Then the lady at the desk said, “I don’t see your appointment in the computer.”
Click. Click. Click. Click.
No.
“I’m sure it was for 11:30am” I said.
She said, well we could do it at 10:30am.
“Okay”
“What is the appointment for?” she asked. “You were just here a month ago.”
“I think it was the diptheria shot and a fecal test.”
More clicking.
She said, “You are up to date on everything, the shot you got is good for 3 years.”
“But I got the reminder card from Payson Pet Care.”
“This is not Payson Pet Care!”
Boom.
Then it made sense. I got the card reminder from Felix’s old vet. I called the number thinking it was the new one.
I did not need an appointment and they did not need my bag of dog poop.
So this is trivial, but if Felix had not crapped at a church, if I had not brought it to my new vet, today I would have shown up there for an appointment I made at another office that I did not even need.
A string of “because this happened, this happened, than that happened.”
This story is about dog poop but it’s not.
It’s how a series of linked events starting with shit can toggle into something that works out beautifully.
And something two people in a veterinarian’s office can laugh at, now and in the future.
I want a life full of crazy sequences like this, not pre-planned data driven experiences “that dovetail into some company’s ‘heartbeat'”
I’ll take dog shit over big data any day.
Aye Eyes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Featured image: And they say it’s hard to find shit in the internet… Butterfly Lunch flickr photo by Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 23 Million views) shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
