There are times my phone ringing brings me a feeling of impending doom. The most recent call was just a couple days ago - I was in our hotel room, cozied up after a long day exploring San Diego, and then the phone rang. As soon as I saw who was calling, my stomach dropped - picking up, I knew what was happening, and as we chatted through the cancellation and why, I was texting my partner to let him know.
It was a challenging dance, really - trying to keep up the polite “it’s ok, feel better” after hearing they’d been under the weather for the past week and also texting “OMG sit cancelled” at the same time. You would think I would have that dance better balanced since this is the third cancellation, but no, not really. It always hits hard and carries that heavy frustration. This time more so than before - over a month I can deal with, a couple weeks, fine, I guess, but within 24 hours - you’ve got to be kidding me.
That level of short notice brought back the feeling of being seen as staff or an employee who functions more as on-call help than an equal person who would expect the respect of a heads-up notice that plans might be changing. It doesn’t happen often that we feel this way, but when that feeling pops up, it’s rude and leaves a bad taste in our mouths.
A cancelled sit isn’t just losing our accommodations, it’s a huge interruption to our work life.
I had just spent hours wandering around the city, exploring, being a tourist, and making plans for things I wanted to do during the three weeks I was pet sitting. We were in San Diego proper for the first time, really, and I was so excited to go to Fleet Week, tour the Midway, go back to Balboa Park, and so many other things, and now it all isn’t happening. As soon as that call ended, I had to go into triage mode - where are we going to stay, how are we going to work - because a cancelled sit isn’t just losing our accommodations, it’s a huge interruption to our work life. Working remotely still means we work, so when a sit cancels Sunday night, we scramble to figure out how we’re going to handle our workday Monday.
Thankfully, our hotel had the flexibility to give us a late checkout, so we got 95% of our workday in, but we were still left with the question of what we were going to do with all this open time now. Applying last minute for sits was, of course, the first step, though nothing panned out there. We checked with my partner’s family about flying up for a bit and got an “of course, come up here, don’t be stupid,” but we weren’t sure about committing to unexpected flight costs. So we also checked our MGM Las Vegas deals, found a four-night hotel stay for $11, and decided to pull the trigger on it just to have somewhere to be for the next few days.
So Monday mid-morning, we committed to driving the six hours back to Las Vegas and tried not to work ourselves up about having to immediately drive back, since we’d been so much closer to Vegas at our previous sit and had driven those four hours south for nothing - a depressing rabbit hole we did our best to avoid.
We also decided to lean into some of my partner’s work that would pay him to show up on location. Instead of relying on someone to agree with our timeframe, we found the least worst of the bad options. So now we have plans for the whole gap - Vegas, on-site work for a while, back to Vegas for another hotel stay before finally going to our next sit - and thankfully it’s not costing two arms and legs, just an arm and a leg.