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You can always tell when there's a bit of warm (or overheating) kit around here, as you'll usually find the cat sitting on it.

Now whether the cat causes the overheating or the warmth attracts the cat is one of those chicken and egg questions...

And mine seems to like to remind me to take regular breaks by coming in and sitting on my keyboard.

"And mine seems to like to remind me to take regular breaks by coming in and sitting on my keyboard."

Two of my three use this tactic to remind me when it's time for their midday meal (a.k.a. 3pm).

Mines the one with the bag of [1]Dreamies in the pocket. (Literally the crack of kitty treats).

[1] https://www.dreamiestreats.co.uk/

Dreamies can always relied on to distract mine. Cat heroin.

Works even better on mine - she ends up lying on the floor tripping...

Reminds me of the time we were travelling to the US to see some friends. My ex suggested taking a bag of catnip for their cats. I said I would use a different customs lane if she wanted to go through carrying a bag containing a green "weed-like" substance...

No Catastrophe? No felines tangled in the Cat5 cabling?

Really, I'll stop now.... stop pushing!

Years ago I had a narrowboat with an air-cooled Lister diesel. The previous owner lived on the boat with 3 GSDs, an overheating problem was diagnosed as dog hair clogging the engine cooling fins. We spent a few hours one evening outside a Black Country pub stripping it down by the light of a Tilley Lamp whilst making regular trips to the bar to prevent dehydration.

Did once open up a fax machine that had come in for repair that had a dead mouse in it, which was a bit grim. I have no clue as to how it got itself inside the machine - I'd have to assume it managed it late on somewhere on the production line as there simply wasn't the space for even a rodent to squeeze through.

Most people are quite surprised at how small a hole a mouse can fit through.

There's small though and then there's small :-)

And as for lizards... I once fixed a non-functional Studer tape deck in the Dhaka office; a lizard had found its way between the rotor and the casing of the capstan motor, which was very nice for it until someone used the machine...

I opened up a pc tower unit at home once because the cat had been camped next to it staring for two days.

As suspected - live mouse in it!

2 pugs, 2 golden retrievers, a very recently rescued Pomeranian (someone had left him on the verge of the A27) and I am not sure if we still have cats* since I put down food for them but they seem to prefer my neighbour's house. Tried one of those robot vacuums but it gave up after ingesting enough dog fur to create a new pug. It also didn't help that one dog would sit on the vacuum and wait for it to drive off. IT-wise I applied the vacuum cleaner to the innards of my only desktop PC and managed to practically double to speed of the computer.

As a measure of how bad it can be I recently sold my wife's Audi TT which has a very small interior space. It cost £90 to have the interior cleaned by a company that prepares cars for resell, in addition to the normal £100 deep "anti-allergy" clean.

* Humans never own cats: they just deign to occasionally eat in your home or defecate on it - a bit like 18th century royalty. Once a paw-operated can opener has been invented then you will never see them again.

Ah, yes. Robotic vacuums ... Here's an apropos repost.

Mine were called FRED, short for Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device. We got four of them for Xmas one year (SWMBO's relatives are in cahoots, it would seem), so we turned one loose on each floor to see what would happen. The cats ignored them, but the dawgs took an instant dislike to them. They all met their demise in under three days.

The first to go was FRED four (the one supposedly patrolling my attic office space). It was found beeping most piteously in a mud puddle under a rhododendron at the far end of the dawg's run. It never rolled again. FRED three disappeared. We never did find it[0]. FRED two kept mysteriously falling down the uncarpeted back-stairs, until the magic smoke came out. FRED one somehow wound up in the laundry sink while a load of wash was running. None of us actually observed roboticide as it was occurring, so we don't know who the perp(s) is/are ... but my money is on the very elderly Standard Poodle, who had a rather guilty, yet satisfied look about him for a week or so afterwards.

Needless to say, we didn't repeat the experiment.

[0] Update: FRED three was found in the crawl-space under the feed barn about a year later. I have no idea how it got there, the only entrance large enough for it to physically fit is the locked trap door in the floor, and I have the only key.

Our FRED (actually he likes to be known as Rodney) does a very good job. The mogs are wary when he wanders around, and the terrier had a good half-day of barking at it, but gave up when he was not getting a reaction.

My cats like to dine out, lots of neighbors with cats and unsecured cat doors. The vet asks what am I feeding one of them, and I reply, "nothing more that the other two."

We have a cat that chop cleanly through 5mm coax with a single bite. And speaker cables, Christmas tree lights...

She somehow manages not to have a go at anything with mains in it though.

And yes, warm laptops are a great place to sleep.

We had a dog that used to lie down under our feet while we sat on the settee, one evening it shot across the room. It'd been chewing on the cord for the reading lamp...

No harm done (except to cable) and didn't happen again.

Out terrier got a liking for USB cables (never mains). No cure - they are now well out of his way.

Not cat related but ... years ago I worked for a manager who was a clear desk fetishist (also cupboards had to be tidy with doors closed, window blinds had to be all up or all don... appearance was all - actually doing the job was secondary). He was really OCD on the subject; his desk was always clear.

At one meeting he pontificated that "a tidy desk is a sign of a tidy mind" -- I just wish I'd had the guts to ask "OK - what does an empty desk signify?"

I should have done so as I left shortly afterwards (so nothing to lose) and the company no longer exists -- who'd have thought that customers preferred deliveries over obsessive tidiness?

Was asked once to look at a relative's fridge, which appeared to have given up the ghost. Investigation turned into stripdown. The thermostat gubbins is s bit if electrickery on a PCB sat underneath the top of the fridge, adorned with pitted trackwork and the remains of a partially copper plated slug*

New fridge time.

*No, the garden pest, not Trump, but I like your train of thought.

"The thermostat gubbins is s bit if electrickery "

... is a bit of ...

I think a cat may have been involved.

But thanks for the copper-plated slug image!

Bloody predictive text.

Predictive text uses 'fuzzy logic'/ai trained by using the output of cats treating keyboards as seats?

What your missing is the % of enjoyment, stress relief and multitude of other benefits having these animals around. Anybody WFH know the benefit of having a pet for company.

- "Forced breaks"

- Zoom background entertainment

- Free heating

- Free "typist"

- Emptying of trash (not sure on the floor helps though).

- Poison tasting

They work for me

The feline B*stards dig a hole in one place, sh1t in another and then try to cover it up in a third. Usually on my seed beds and not their 'owners' house.

Anyone who can't keep control of their pet should not be allowed to keep one. That rule works for other animals - why not cats?

I know a lot of farm animals can be trained more that a cat.

I put netting over the seed bed once and the cat from over the road got tangled up in it in the middle of the night waking most of the street up. I presented the catawalling tangle of net and cat to the neighbour and asked for a new net in return - at 03:00. The owners were only renting the house and moved rather than let the cat out again, and didn't replace the net!

Anonymous because there are strange folk who actually like cats ;-)

As one of two Human staff to a large, fuzzy, loud, has to be part of everything, goes everywhere Norwegian forest cat, the hoover is an essential tool. Roughly a half-cat of fur is sucked into the long suffering Dyson each week, it gets worse in March when he sheds the winter coat.

Also, very high on the priority list for the new gaming PC was a case with very solid dust filtering. The sheer amount of fluff that builds up on the existing PC front mesh, despite it being on the desk, is fairly awesome.

Can't complain too much - he's an apartment cat, and he's absolutly helped with 9 months of WFH and not seeing family etc, and he's a great copilot when gaming. Less appreciated is the 6am 'Feed me Human' shenanigans...!

The indoor cats here are mostly Skogkatts & Maine Coons. They have full access to the outdoors, but are usually found napping indoors, draped elegantly over whatever they can shed on the most ... or trying to con somebody out of food.

I agree with the above post.

and he's a great copilot when gaming

Mines not. he managed to hit F7, which is "Load last saved game" and cost me much progress!

Fond (well, kinda) memories of the six-monthly disassembly of my Gateway laptop to remove the customary 10mm wedge of cat fur from the fan vent. Freddie loved sitting next to the computer, just where all that lovely heat was coming out. And it wasn't even a gaming laptop :) Still it was a good design, MX8716B; made 2007 and still going in 2016!

Then there was the time I received a frantic phone call from mother 120 miles away; the monitor on her computer was dead. Power light showing, caps lock on computer goes on/off when toggled, etc. Checked VGA cable - cat teeth marks all over it. Siri (short for Syringa Superba, her pedigree name - this was long before iPhones became popular) loved it so much, Mum had to fit hot water pipe cladding around all the exposed mains cables in the house, and the network cable too.

Bitter apple spray usually stops pets chewing inappropriately. Just make sure whatever you are spraying is unplugged, and has a chance to dry before plugging it back in.

The kids hamster has duly polished off a £45 laptop charger (which the wife thought she could fix by just mashing the wires back together and wrapping with electrical tape) and went through the broadband line. Pretty much every cable within nibbling range has got teeth marks in it - suspect it's only a matter of time before there's a loud *POP* and a shower of singed hamster fur.

Our children's hamster escaped. Not to be found until several days later the fridge went into overdrive and everything inside went irretrievably ice-bound overnight.

'Hammy' (I know, I know) was found within a ball of fluff in the continuously-running compressor, warm as toast but no longer a danger having chewed through and shorted the thermostat.

New fridge, new contents, no more hamsters.

In my unofficial IT "expert" role I was once asked to look at the computer of a friend of the Significant Other – said computer was running very slowly and randomly restarting. I expected it to be full of dodgy DLLs and the like and to have to have a discrete word about browsing habits with the hubby of said friend. Instead it turned out that the computer which was kept on the floor had sucked in so many carpet fibres that the components on the motherboard weren't even visible.

Living with two of the furry psychopaths, I had to move to a wireless mouse on the desktop. Never had major hair problem, but I did come across a dessicated mouse on a couple of occasions, carefully stashed behind one of the servers.

My (wife's) cats have destroyed two laptops just with some piss at just the right spot and they have managed to pull out keys from from several keyboards. Not long ago one managed to put my wife's Windows into portrait mode just by walking across the keyboard, ctrl, alt and arrow at the same time.

And you might ask me how I let that happen, and I ask exactly the same question.

... I clean out the computers in the barns, whether they need it or not. It's amazing how much dust and hair can accumulate in a desktop PC without affecting it noticeably. The one in the main barn office gets especially bad when we are clipping horses ...

Cats definitely help me keep a tidy desk. Every item on the desk becomes a plaything, and every plaything ends up on the floor.

My cats stomping across the laptop keyboard seems to manage to find any number of keyboard shortcuts which occasionally do so much damage that a reboot is required to get my OS back to normal. So I have started locking the screen as soon as he jumps up now to be on the safe side.

My cat made a brief appearence in a video call job interview a couple of weeks ago.

Didnt get job :(

Not blaming cat though.

The cats have unfortunately passed away, but when they were both alive it wasn't too much of an issue. It's difficult to get behind the machines under the desk, or I could at least normally nudge them with my foot/shout at them when they tried it.

I can also recommend having a cat tree next to your desk so the cats have somewhere to sit on when you're working instead of your desk/keyboard.

On the other hand, the sofa needed a regular vacuuming with the special cat hair attachment.

Kittens in 2021, will see what impact they have.