When Dogs-at-Work Goes Bad
The poop room eventually became the office of the vice president of marketing
At a small consulting company in northern California, I worked with eight or nine team members in a beautifully refurbished old house, and we took pride in being hipster.
At some point, the vice president of Operations (half the employees were VPs) decided she wanted to bring her dog to work, so she created a dogs-at-work policy. And she started bringing her coonhound, Dirgo, to the office almost daily. Our vice president of Client Services adopted a nervous 11-month-old boxer, named Bedelia, and this energetic pup also became a regular presence at our workplace.
At the time, pets-at-work was considered the ultimate employee benefit at all the cool northern California companies.
When we had our company meetings in the living room, inevitably Dirgo or Bedelia would try to get everyone’s attention, running around, barking, plopping rawhide toys at our feet, or adorably resting their snouts on our laps, which, in Bedelia’s case, inevitably left a twin trail of drool on your lap. Some of my co-workers were annoyed by this, but most seemed perfectly okay with it. Some just loved dogs so much; they couldn’t help but cup Dirgo’s or Bedelia’s sweet doggy faces in their hands and tell them in baby tones how “skoochy” they were.
We were hipster, alright, and even had a meditation room tucked away upstairs. The floor was fully covered with an off-white carpet and the room had a low sloped ceiling. There wasn’t any furniture, just some meditation cushions and an altar with incense and fake flowers. This room was a cherished workplace benefit that we felt helped define us. In the early days of the company, we’d occasionally meditate together. A few of us still found time to slip away into the room for some solo practice. Not much was held sacred at this workplace, but we maintained sanctity in this much-appreciated space.
My office was just outside the meditation room. One afternoon, Dirgo and Bedelia were chasing each other around, causing a ruckus, as usual. Suddenly, things got quiet. And after a few minutes, I smelled something rank. I got up to investigate and, sure enough, there in the meditation room, perfectly centered in the middle of the off-white carpet like a ceremonial offering, was a giant pile of fresh, stinky dog poop. Behind me, an ashamed Dirgo, head held low and tail between his legs, skulked away toward the stairs. Bedelia stood looking at me from an adjacent office, front paws slightly pointed out, breathing hard, eyes wide open and looking like she’d say, “Wow, man. That game got, like, totally out of control. Did you see the giant pile of poop?!”
The meditation room became known as the poop room, and immediately lost its allure. The poop room eventually became the office of the vice president of Marketing (the only one short enough to stand up in there, because of the sloped ceiling).
My Human Resources colleagues will say that this was simply a matter of people (dog owners) needing to be managed. And my Training friends will say it needed some skilled crucial conversations with “I” messages (“I feel like throwing up when your dog poops on the spot in which I expected to achieve nirvana.”)
But in the real world, where most of us go into a workplace every day and work with a lot of other people, “what employees want” often — in fact, almost always — conflicts with what other employees want.
One employee’s pet-at-work is another employee’s poop-at-work.
Image by Alan Smith