Petey Says It’s Time To Wake Up
July 28th, 2008 by ComputerBob
People who own cats know that they can often be very insistent about what they want, and very clever to find ways to tell you that they want it.
Our cat Petey is a perfect example of that. Years ago, he figured out that if he could wake my wife and me up a little earlier, he could get his breakfast a little earlier.
And being the clever little guy that he is, he knew that he could wake us up by making noise. So, years ago, he started jumping up onto my nighstand next to our bed and carefully shoving items off of the nightstand onto the floor until I woke up. Sometimes it was spare change; other times, it was my watch. He didn’t care what he pushed off of my nightstand, as long as it woke me up.
When I caught on to that little trick, I started putting everything inside my night stand. So then Petey started to loudly knock the phone off of the hook on my wife’s side of the bed. We had to put the phone where he couldn’t dislodge it.
Then he started playing with my old clock radio, pushing its buttons to try to get it to wake me up. Instead of waking me up, he managed to change its time more than once, which forced me to cover all of its buttons with a cardboard flap.
A few days later, he started stretching to his full length and reaching up to rattle the venetian blinds on our bedroom window. After a few days of that, I raised those blinds to a height that he couldn’t reach.
When we had finally removed every object that Petey could possibly use to wake us up, he thought of something new: He would sit one inch away from my wife’s or my face, and then gently touch us on the cheek with one paw.
After we shooed him away and went back to sleep enough times, he gave up on that idea.
But last week, we bought new digital clock radios, because it’s much nicer to be woken up by the quiet sound of classical music than by a blaring, buzzing alarm sound.
A few nights ago, my wife turned off her clock radio’s alarm so that she could sleep in the next morning. But a little before 7:00 AM, it came on anyway, waking her up to the familiar sound of classical music. Next to her clock radio sat Petey, proud of himself for having figured that he could push the button on the left end of the top to make the radio come on.
So yesterday, I cut a couple of pieces of clear, stiff, plastic “bubble” from the protective packaging of some glue that I have, and taped it over that “on” button on each of our clock radios. We can still push those buttons if we want to listen to the radio, but I think they’re stiff enough that Petey won’t be able to push them.
I wonder what he’s going to think of next.
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