Professional Puppy?

6/12/09

Arriving late to an early morning meeting, I didn't have time to put Jazz in the office first, so I decided he could just go to the meeting with me. As I entered the meeting room, I found the only open chair to be between the CEO and VP. I sat Jazz down next to me, and the CEO reached down and gently started petting him. I gave Jazz a quiet toy to play with, and asked him to settle on the floor. Within minutes he was bored. He began his favorite game of chewing on his leash, followed by the game of rolling around biting at it when I tried to correct him for it. While being sure to continue to pay attention to the meeting, I reached down and rearranged Jazz, removing the leash from his mouth, putting him back in an appropriate down, and placing his toy back in front of him. Within minutes he was rolling around again, crawling under my chair, chewing at his leash, grabbing at my hand, and attempting to chew on the VP's leather purse handle. Fortunately, I caught that one before he was successful!

After a while, I decided enough is enough! I pulled Jazz up into my lap and placed him in the "calming puppy position," careful to stroke his belly very gently, as he is rather ticklish and starts kicking with all four legs, which would have had the opposite effect. As I gently stroked his big puppy belly, he calmed and relaxed. Within minutes, he was sound asleep. He adjusted himself slightly, curling up in my arms like a baby. Then, he began to snore. Loudly. And he continued to snore, loudly.

As I pretended to not notice that there was a snoring puppy in the room, my coworkers smiled at him and chuckled with amusement. As our consultant (on videoconference) wrapped up on something we were all done listening to, the CFO teased him that he had bored the puppy to sleep.

Jazz may need to work on his professionalism a bit, but he kept us all sane through that meeting!