A pet parent felt embarrassed after she mistakenly left her dog at an accounting office thinking it was a doggy day care. And she didn’t drop the dog off for just one day, she did it for weeks because the staff loved having the dog around so much they didn’t tell her!
Redditor SwarmTendon, who worked at the office, recounted the hilarious but sweet story online. It all began when the dog owner mistakenly showed up with the dog.
SwarmTendon explained that her office was dog friendly, with many co-workers bringing their dogs to the office. They also kept dog food and water bowls at the front door.
“Of the six of us who worked in the main office area, I was the only one who didn’t have a dog (no pets policy at the apartment) and always felt horribly left out,” SwarmTendon wrote. “To make matters worse, across the way was a doggy day care.”
She says that “a very frantic” woman arrived with “an absolutely massive basset hound”.
The basset’s owner asked her if she worked there. When the Redditor said yes, the woman asked, “I wasn’t sure if you took walk ins but I read online I could just drop him off? I tried to call but no answer.”
“I didn’t know what she was talking about at that point and I said ‘Come again? Who did you call exactly?’ Thinking if I could just saddle her off to whoever she came to see, I wouldn’t have to decipher her problem,” said SwarmTendon.
But before she could check things out, the woman insisted she just needed to leave her dog, Otis, with her for a few hours. “She said ‘Well it doesn’t matter now. Look, something urgent has come up and I really need to leave him here. Here’s his food he likes and I’ll be back in a few hours.”
Stock photo. Ernest Roy/Pixabay
She continued, “At this point I wasn’t thinking of the doggy day care – I thought maybe she was a friend of someone here. I said ‘Well alright, can I get your name please?’ And she said her name and then asked if I needed her to sign anything and I was so confused at this point I just said ‘Why would I need you to sign something’” And she left almost immediately.”
So the Redditor brought Otis to her desk. She was impressed by how calm Otis was. “Otis was supremely chill. All he did all day was lie around and drool onto his own ears. I just freshened him up every now and then, took him out every couple hours, and he was happy as a clam on a big cushy dog bed we thankfully had an extra of. He just loved attention from anywhere he could get it.
But SwarmTendon wasn’t without her concerns. “I was worried she wouldn’t come back, but at the same time, my wish for an office dog had been granted,” she said. “At the end of the day the woman, thank God, came back. She said ‘Thanks, you’re a lifesaver. How was he?’, and I said ‘He was a champ’.”
She was about to add, “I was about to say ‘But why is he here’ when she said ‘That’s a relief. Most kennels say he gets anxious around other dogs. I heard you operated at a much higher capacity, I was thrilled to see you had so few clients in the room at one time. So, how much do I owe? That’s when I realised she thought we were a dog day care.”
The Redditor admits she should have corrected the woman but she loved her day with Otis and “did want to get paid for supervising this strange dog all day”. So, she just said, “That’ll be £20.”
The shocked pet owner asked, “Really?”, making SwarmTendon think, “In this very high tone, and I couldn’t tell if I’d overshot or undershot.”
SwarmTendon thought that was the end of the funny story and her time with Otis. But that turned out not to be the case. Otis’ owner came back for the next week, impressed by how “affordable and less overcrowded than her other place” SwarmTendon’s office was.
SwarmTendon didn’t correct the woman and “was glad for the company so just took him. I didn’t think there was any way she couldn’t have at least some idea we weren’t a dog day care. The whole ordeal was so strange I just figured ‘don’t question a good thing.'”
Soon, Otis was being dropped off several times a week.
“I was in heaven. He was such a love. And he made fast friends with the delivery guys and visitors,” says the Redditor of Otis. “One day we took our office Christmas card photo and Otis was over that day so we included him in a Santa hat. It was pretty great.”
But one day the jig was up. “But it turns out Otis’ owner was friends with one of our clients who I guess happened to have the card out on her table or was kind enough to display it alongside her other holiday cards. Because one day Otis’ owner came in holding the card and walked up to me and said ‘I can’t even believe I’m asking this but… is that my dog in this photo? This isn’t a dog day care at all. This is just an office, isn’t it?'”
The Redditor wrote, “She said it with a note of surprise, as though she was looking around and putting it all together for the first time (no coincidence that this was the first time she wasn’t in some crazy rush either.) She was like ‘Then who are all these other dogs?'”
SwarmTendon explained trepidatiously that the other dogs were the employees’ dogs. “I was terrified she was going to demand her money back, or worse, take some sort of legal action against us for misrepresenting ourselves as a dog care business, or complain to corporate,” she explained.
“Instead she basically said ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything?’ And I explained we just really liked having Otis around. She stopped for a minute and seemed to be thinking and said ‘Is that right?’. I said yes and told the story of how I was the only one in the office without a dog so loved the company,” the Redditor wrote.
Stock photo. Susan Spensley from Pixabay
The woman asked another employee at the office to verify SwarmTendon’s explanation and they did.
“So she said ‘Well, I wish you’d said something sooner. Could’ve saved me a lot of embarrassment with my friend back there. Alright, I have to get going. See you at 4pm.’ She left Otis! I couldn’t believe it. I said ‘So he can stay?’ And she replied ‘Where else could I find someone to watch him one-on-one all day for £20?’ And off she went,” the Redditor said.
She concluded her funny story by revealing: “Otis stayed my office dog until his family moved away, luckily right around the same time I took a new job.”
SwarmTendon also revealed that after the truth came out, the pet parent shared with her what a good sport she was about the whole thing.
“To add to the wholesomeness I can share that as we got to chat with her some once it was all out in the open, she’d tell us how she’d never get tired of making jokes about it to people. Like, ‘I’ve got to pick Otis up from work at around 4:00.’ And they’d all ask ‘what do you mean, is he a service dog?’ And she’d say ‘Nope, he’s an accountant.'”
She also added that Otis’ mom, “once went so far as to take a nonbeliever on the drive with her and walk him into our office then walk out without him. She was just beside herself cracking up as she explained to us the joke she was playing. We could see her friend’s puzzled/shocked reaction from the car as she emerged without him and got a kick out of it too.”
SwarmTendon said Otis also loved the office. “He’d never want to get up to leave (I think he just never wanted to get up) and without fail, every time she got him, she’d say ‘What’s the matter buddy? Long day at the office?’ And laugh hysterically.”
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