Have your cat’s shenanigans ever completely wrecked your day?

Poor Zorro, or maybe happy Zorro. He’s been in the spotlight lately. I’ve talked about him in many of my articles

Here’s what went down:

1. Zorro vomits

All cats do, right? I’ve sure seen my share of it in my household. And it makes a big difference where a cat vomits and where the vomit lands.

Zorro has always had a sensitive stomach. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that he is my only purebred. (We once had a purebred Keeshond dog, and she had a fussier stomach than any of the other mutt cats and dogs in the household. In fact, we joke that Zorro could be the reincarnation of the Keeshond, as Zorro looks a bit like that dog.) Anyway, Zorro will occasionally have a day where nothing seems to sit right in his stomach. He’s been tested and nothing seems wrong. Zorro was having one of those days about a week ago.

2. Zorro vomits in the worst possible place in the house

We had relatives visiting, who were fairly cat-savvy. They knew that a cat vomiting might or might not be something to worry about. So they alerted me.

“Hey, Cat! Your cat just threw up on the modem.”

Yikes!

Selfishly, I must admit that I thought first of the modem. I knew Zorro was having one of his days. Perhaps he had gotten into Chester’s Fancy Feast (which disturbs Zorro but which Chester loves better than other canned food). The wireless router, which had been provided by my Internet provider, had little holes in the top of its plastic encasing. Sure enough, Zorro’s thin vomit had gone right into the holes.

I unplugged the router and turned it upside down. Liquid dripped out of the equipment and I let it sit for some time, with paper towel underneath to absorb the runoff. But the damage had been done. When we tried much later to plug the router back in, certain lights came on, but not the right ones. The Internet would not work.

3. We scramble

We don’t live in quite the remote rural place that we used to live, but it is still rural, and probably remote by New England standards. As we both depend heavily on the Internet for work, we had to scramble and figure out what we were going to do. The first thing I did was to call the provider, but it was the Friday prior to Labor Day. They could (and did) ship a replacement, but it would not go out until the Tuesday after Labor Day. As it turns out, did not actually arrive here until Friday. Thank the gods I acted on a Plan B.

4. Plan B

We are rural enough that there are very few Wi-Fi hotspots around. I spent some time in a nearby library, and the librarian laughed when I told him how my modem had been damaged by a vomiting cat. He said that my story was a first. But after a day of driving to the library and stressing about work logistics, I bit the bullet. I drove to the nearest place to get a router, two hours away at a big box store. I spent a lot of money, even though my provider was sending me one for free. But we really couldn’t be without the Internet for very long.

As a bonus (there’s always a positive!), it turns out this router is much better than the cheaper model provided by the Internet provider. And as a bigger bonus, it doesn’t have tiny holes in its casing, so no more worries about cat vomit. Yeah!

Has your cat ever done a crazy, freaky, accidental thing that changed your life for a few days? Tell us about it in the comments!

More by Catherine Holm:

• 6 Massive Life Lessons My Cats Taught Me without Trying
• Do You Have a Velcro Cat? Here are 7 Ways to Tell
• 8 Ways I’m EXACTLY Like My Cats
• We Applaud Feline And Friends’ TNR Efforts in Vermont
• Let’s Talk — Would You Join a Grief Support Group to Mourn a Cat?
• Five Tips to Help a Friend Facing Grief After the Loss of a Cat
• Let’s Talk about Why We Love Having Multiple Cats
• How to Tell if Your Cat is a Micromanager
• Does Your Cat Remind You of Your Mother?

About Catherine Holm: Told that she is funny but doesn’t know it, accused of being an unintentional con artist by her husband, quiet, with frequent unannounced bursts into dancing liveliness, Cat Holm loves writing about, working for, and living with cats. She is the author of The Great Purr (cat fantasy novel out June 1), the cat-themed memoir Driving with Cats: Ours for a Short Time, the creator of Ann Catanzaro cat fantasy story gift books, and the author of two short story collections. She loves to dance, be outside whenever possible, read, play with cats, make music, do and teach yoga, and write. Cat lives in the woods, which she loves as much as really dark chocolate, and gets regular inspiration shots along with her double espresso shots from the city.