House pet training in reverse
Countdown to teaching my dog how to use the bathroom inside after mastering potty training outside
I’m fairly certain Junee thinks I’ve lost my mind. She just turned 3 years old yesterday and mastered potty training within a couple of months of me adopting her on Juneteenth 2021. And now my goal is to get her to pee or poop indoors. If she was a human, she’d roll her eyes and say, “Make up your mind, lady. I’m grown!”
In retrospect, I wish I would have simultaneously paper trained her inside at the same time that I trained her to go outside. This is what my parents did with my Labrador Retriever mix. (My German Shepherd refused to urinate inside and would just hold it until someone came home.) However, adopting her during the middle of the pandemic and with a wide assortment of freelance clients made me believe it was pointless to paper train. I was going to be home every single day anyway. And the entire reason I joined Rover and Wag! was to get exercise by walking outside. At this very moment, I’m one dog short of walking 100 different dogs since 2019.
So why would I skip a dog walk for newspaper or artificial grass turf cleanup instead?
Returning to the office, WFH jobs harder to keep
Unfortunately, for many pandemic pet owners, maintaining work-from-home (WFH) jobs gets to be a bit tougher when clients are now looking to return to “normal.” Freelancers are getting phased out for in-person, full-timers in some cases.
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Minority workers are particularly dreading this. In fact, in a Future Forum Pulse survey, 86% of Latino workers and 81% of Asian/Asian-American and African-American workers would prefer a hybrid or fully remote arrangement. Slate did a great job of explaining why the corporate microaggressions significantly diminish and mental health improves when minorities have WFH jobs.
I can 100% relate to this opinion, but I’d started exclusively working from home two years before I’d ever heard the word “coronavirus.” I’d earned as much money freelancing as I was with a job in Corporate America, and I was mentally drained from that job. With a mix of dog walking, Lyft driving and freelancing, I thought I was Scrooge McDuck. The problem? Freelancing is like surfing. You can ride the wave for awhile, but your clients have no obligation to keep you around. You can work for them for a year or two, and there’s nothing stopping them from abruptly ending your contract. Without you physically in front of them, some clients can too easily forget about you — and not have to pay unemployment.