Dog walkers for hire, should you have your own contract?
The peculiar Rover story on 'Wine & Weed Podcast'
It is no surprise to me that “Sinners” has made more than $45 million at the box office. It’s one of those movies that you see in theaters and wonder how much time you have to watch it again the same day. In fact, after seeing the film, I returned home and watched just about every “Sinners” cast interview I could find, including Ryan Coogler’s podcast Proximity Media about movie production. And while traveling down that rabbit hole, I randomly ran across an interview with Michael B. Jordan with his best friend Steelo Brim on a podcast I’d never heard of: “Wine & Weed Podcast.”
I watched a few more episodes of his dog-loving friend and co-host Chris Reinacher. The hosts bickered about everything from Cool Ranch Doritos versus Fritos, women’s reproductive rights, politics, cancel culture, Elvis Presley versus Michael Jackson, Nicki Minaj’s mean girl persona, meth-addicted dog nappers, and anti-racism — while smoking, drinking and making a few surprisingly solid points.
Besides the episode with Michael B. Jordan trying to help Steelo Brim rescue his dogs from a sketchy couple, there was one other story that stayed on my mind in the early episodes. Steelo hired a dog walker on Rover, who took his job way too seriously.
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If you haven’t seen the episode, at the 42:20 mark, Steelo talked about how he and his Rover dog walker met on the app. But the first day that his dog walker showed up, he brought a seven-page contract. That threw me completely off as a dog walker who joined Rover the same year (2019) as this podcast episode.
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While almost all of my dog walking (and a few sittings and drop-ins) are from Wag!, I’ve completed a couple handfuls of Rover hires and know one thing is clear: You don’t need an extra contract for the dog walking app, especially considering Rover already has Terms of Service and a background check that dog walkers have to agree to ahead of time.