eat, sleep, poop, jump, lick, wag, sniff and bark

Saskia came with some pre-installed routines: eat, sleep, poop, jump, lick, wag, sniff and bark. Each native routine has subroutines. For example, when the wag and lick routines are applied concurrently the ‘look how cute I am’ subroutine becomes active. I soon decided that some modifications to her pre-installed routines were highly desirable.  The ‘poop- anywhere’ routine was easily changed to ‘poop- outside only’.  Given that success I got cocky and thought I could reprogram the entire system. I started with the routines with the simplest installations. I installed ‘sit’ and at first it looked like a success. But later it became apparent that it didn’t install properly since I got the ‘sit-for a millisecond just ‘cause you told me to’ subroutine. Also the ‘sit’ routine apparently can’t be used to deactivate the ‘jump-on people’ routine.

Then I installed ‘stop that and lie down’ routine and got the ‘blank stare’ feedback. I may be paranoid but think the ‘blank stare’ feedback is not an automatic response, I think the system activates that feedback on purpose whenever it doesn’t feel like performing a command line. 

The repeated activation of the ‘look at how cute I am’ routine made me accidentally install the ‘beg whenever you smell rotisserie chicken’ virus by mistake. This virus is also responsible for the ‘Kibble? You expect me to eat kibble?” facial hardware distortion which I find very annoying.

I’ve almost managed to install the ‘don’t bark at every noise you hear’ routine, but I haven’t managed to locate and delete the line of code responsible for the ‘shut-up bitch and let me bark’ stance. I’ll keep looking.

I tried to install ‘don’t spend half an hour sniffing one spot on the sidewalk’ but it only works with the ‘tug of the leash’ patch.  I tried to modify the ‘eat’ routine to exclude ‘crap off the sidewalk’ but apparently the change would require a modification to the ‘yum’ code in the line ‘sniff- yum, this smells like it’s been dead for a week’, and changes to ‘yum’ requires advanced programming skills which I just don’t have.

I wrote a ‘don’t follow me into the bathroom and let me pee alone’ routine but now I have little hope it will work. The ‘stop shedding all over the place’ is the holy grail of routines, no-one has yet managed to write the code for it.  I’ve been told that there are professional programmers and published instruction manuals that teach you how to properly rewrite these routines.  But we all know that instruction manuals are for people who don’t know what they are doing. Years ago mother tried to uninstall the ‘instruction manuals are for losers’ subroutine in my ‘smarty pants’ routine, but she too had limited success. Oh well.