The Dirty Dog

A friend recently had occasion to visit the local GP for a routine check-up after which she enquired whether her Doctor had enjoyed his recent day-trip to London. She had joined him and his family, the preceding Saturday, on a theatre outing organized by a mutual friend. This cautionary, yet true, tale is a reasonably accurate account of what he told her. Names have been omitted simply to protect the embarrassed...

The doctor had recently refurbished the entire downstairs of his house with the installation of new synthetic marble flooring along with an under-floor heating system. At the same time he had removed most of the carpets, as carpet mites had been blamed for aggravating their youngest child’s asthmatic condition. Coincidentally they just visited a neighbour who having refurbished his house in a similar way had also invested in an automated cleaning system. The cleaning was effected by a robotic contrivance on wheels that was timed to come on after midnight and could clean the entire ground floor meticulously and thoroughly by the use of sensors. Being something of self-confessed, gadget-geek, the Doctor needed little persuasion to decide that a similar system might be worth considering. It was quite an investment, being state of the art technology and the Doctor admitted he’d spent a couple of nights stood nervously on the staircase to observe the amazing device perform its chores. However it performed the task it was designed for perfectly.

The week-end of the London outing having arrived, the doctor, his wife and two younger children, went on their way. The eldest son, a lad of 16, chose to stay at home in their house with a couple of friends, who were having a sleep-over after spending the day together “chillin.”  The only instructions they were given were to keep the place tidy and make sure they put Geronimo, their lively, 10 month-old Springer spaniel, out before they retired to bed.

The outing to the capital had gone well apart from the fact that the bus driver, insisting on the statutory break in his driving schedule, didn’t arrive back at the pick-up point until around 11:00 p.m. As a result the bus didn’t make it back to Loughborough until twenty-five minutes to one. Rather tired after the days exertions the Doctor still had to drive his family the five miles from town to their home in the middle of Charnwood Forest.

They arrived at the back door of their farmhouse which was in darkness. They entered the kitchen to find a scribbled note from their son to say that he had gone to bed. However, they sensed all was not quite right. There was a pungent smell in the air and the normally gleaming floor of the kitchen was smeared in disgusting goo.  Tiptoeing into the open-plan lounge area they discovered the same devastation. The floors were covered from skirting to skirting in a brown slime and it was evident from the stink just what it was! The doctor and his wife cautiously carried their younger children to the stairs and put them to bed. Of course, they could not retire themselves and spent the next three hours cleaning and disinfecting the entire ground floor. Walls, door-frames and furniture; all had to be scrubbed. Two lengths of rush matting, passed all hope of reclamation, were immediately skipped. The patio curtains that draped onto the floor were stripped down and put to soak in the hope they could be salvaged.  Luckily it was a balmy evening so the doors could be left wide open in the hope some of the stench would be diffused. Geronimo, who had ‘done the dirty deed’ was clearly aware of the fact that he was somewhat responsible for the frenzy of activity so had sensibly decided to make himself scarce. The robot that had so competently distributed the ‘doggie-dos’ to every corner of the ground floor sat blissfully ignorant under the stairs like some cowering servant. Its wheels were still clogged in the offending gunk that it had obviously encountered when it had started its cleaning regime just after midnight.

By this stage in the retelling of the tale my friend said she was close to tears in a vain attempt at sympathy with the doctor’s dilemma. Yet apart from the frequent repetition of the words “oh dear” she couldn’t think what else to say. Without going into too much detail about the state of the soft furnishings, the doctor concluded by describing how the next morning his eldest son arrived downstairs with his pals blissfully ignorant of the discourse that awaited them. Before the lecture the boy did say, “who’s been splashing out with all the disinfectant?” The Doctor did not explain how he and his wife managed to resist strangling their first-born. Suffice to say that the lad was chided for not letting the dog out to do its business before retiring and his pocket money for the next two months was forfeited. By way of an excuse the boy could only argue, “well it’s not my fault, the dog didn’t ask to go out!”