Screw O2, Be More Cat

Screw O2, Be More Cat
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Have you seen those O2 adverts about how you should be more dog? If you want something like a stick or a ball or maybe the latest 4G Samsung, you should just charge up and grab it. Like a dog would. What dogs are, O2 think, is proactive. If a dog wanted to arrange a meeting she wouldn't ahead first. She would just turn up at your office, barge straight up to your desk and wee on the carpet. You should be more like that.

I don't know if you have a dog. I don't even know if you, as a reader of this blog, exist at all. I do know that I exist, and I quite distinctly remember having a dog when I was a kid. He was an excellent animal who I miss and loved, but I wouldn't have wanted him making my life choices for me. He would root around for a stick, carry it for maybe two minutes with apparent glee, and then lose interest and drop it. That's well and good for sticks, which are readily available, but it's a less sound approach to selecting a smartphone.

We also had a cat when I was very little. When I was about four or five we gave her a wind up toy mouse for Christmas. We wrapped it for her and everything. She sat and watched with undisguised disdain as it pottered mechanically around the floor. Then she wandered off. She would, I am confident, have reacted exactly the same if you had presented her with an i-phone. Dogs love to chase and grab and bury stuff. If you sold a dog an i-phone it would be irreparably destroyed within the hour. If you have the same toy to a cat, it would get ignored until you were using it, at which point it would be sat on.

Because cats have two distinct qualities over dogs. They aren't interested in toys when you want them to be and they aren't interested in you when you want them to be either. A cat wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Although to be fair to the cat I can't say for sure whether she would understand the value of pissing on you in this scenario. She might just think it was needlessly adding insult to injury. If she wanted to be super helpful she might bring you a dead bird. Your dog would bring you your phone, but it would be irredeemably chewed and no use to anyone. She would also bring you a stick, which would serve to spread the conflagration further.

So people treat the two animals accordingly. If you want a dog to have a stick you throw it for her to chase. If you want a cat to have a stick, you bring her a series of sticks, each superior to the last and each rejected with equal contempt. Eventually you dump them in a bundle in despair, and the cat would claim all of them. She, not the dog, is your role model for beating the big brands.