When I first went to meet with my May Project sponsor she described something very different from what I had previously been told I would be doing. She told me that I would be working on completely redoing the Animal House’s social media while also socializing with cats every single day. I thought I would be cleaning a little each day and spend the rest of my hours at the Animal House socializing with kittens.
On the first day my partners and I walked in and were given a very quick rundown on the Animal House’s sanitation rules and procedures. We were shown every cat in the whole building and were given small jobs to get each of us started. Some people were sent into the cat rooms to deal with cats in a cage the size of a small room. When a person enters the room they have to be wearing plastic shoe covers and clothes that cover their body from head to toe. This was due to sanitation reasons, and not because of safety issues.
Each person had to accomplish multiple tasks while in the room. You had to scoop the litter boxes, sweep the room, reorganize the blankets and toys, play with the cats individually, clean and refill the water dishes, and clean and refill the food bowls. When you were in the room you had to make sure every cat felt enough affection and that everyone was clean and safe. If you did not perform any of these stages or jobs you normally had to completely redo the whole list of tasks. The rules were strict but they were all created so that cat diseases were never spread and that the cats were always living in a nice area.
While all the other JBS volunteers were cleaning the big rooms I was told to fold the laundry. No one could ever imagine how much laundry has to be completed at an animal shelter. They have multiple machines going all the time cleaning blankets and towels. They probably had close to 400 towels of different shapes and sizes. When I was told to do the laundry I thought it might take twenty minutes and I would be ready to play with cats right after that. It turned out I would be doing laundry for the next two hours. I quickly fell into a pattern of folding and organizing but it was a lot of work. Most of the other students had shifted around the building to one or two different jobs while I was stuck doing laundry.
Quickly after finishing folding I was handed a kitten that was only a few weeks old. I was told that this cat was younger than most of the other kittens at Animal House but the kitten was huge for its age. Earlier I had seen one of the students playing with a kitten that looked young but in fact was actually older than the kitten I was told to socialize.
This cat that I was playing with was one of the cutest animals I had ever met. It was jumping around the play area climbing on walls and constantly playing with toys. It loved to be swaddled and purred for close to twenty minutes straight. It almost fell asleep in my arms multiple times but was quickly awakened by some flashy toy that caught her attention. I was assigned to play with the kitten for an hour and I enjoyed every second of it. This was the exact reason why I signed up to work at an animal shelter. I was hoping that I would be helping cats that were born into bad situations but also having the ability to have fun while preparing cats for adoption.
The first day was an intense introduction. I had to complete manual labor, clean up for cats that were not completely healthy, fold laundry, and help socialize a kitten. Throughout the rest of my time at the Animal House I worked on mostly the same jobs with a couple more items that I had to accomplish for busywork.
I met my favorite cat just while walking around the Animal House. She was an adolescent female cat named Patricia that was caged with her brother, Dean. They were the most energetic cats in the entire facility. When they were taken out to play they would sprint around the room chasing and hitting rubber balls around. It was a kind of soccer played between the two cats. One of them would hit the ball and bounce it off of any wall or object in its way. Then the cat would grow bored and its sibling would take over. This could go on for hours because they never seemed to lose any of their energy. I loved how Patricia would play like this with her brother but was also very fond of human contact as well.
This fondness of humans was not embedded in each of the cats. At one point I was attacked by one of the cats while I was working in one of the room-sized cages. I had just finished cleaning and rearranging the entire room when I sat down in the cage to play with them for a bit. I was using one of the toys given to me before I entered the room and most of the cats were playing with the toy like they should. After a while the excitement in the room died down and I started to brush and pet the cats around me. They all loved this part of the room cleaning because they loved the affection and human contact that was required. After dealing with the most outgoing pets I started to approach the more introverted ones. I first dealt with the ones that were alone but then I went up to two of the cats that were hanging out in the corner of the room. I pet the one closer for me for a few minutes then reached over to pet the one that was slightly farther away. The second my hand had reached that cat she flipped and clawed at my hand. I threw my arm back and launched the brush I was holding into the wall. The cat didn’t do much damage to me but I will always remember my May Project by the tiny scar I acquired.
For the second part of my May Project I worked with a marketing and consultation group. It was mostly remote work because I was pretty sick during this period of the project. My main assignment during this time was figuring out a program and creating a set of guidelines and tutorials on how to work with it. The program itself was not too difficult to understand but the tutorials I had to create needed to be well written and easy to use for the reader. I had to reword the tutorials several times to make sure that they were well-written before they would be used.
My next major task was to organize and count every item in the storeroom. I had to keep track of every single item in the room while doing it all as quickly as possible without any errors. It took many hours and was very repetitive but it was actually quite fun. Compared to folding laundry I would work in a storeroom any day. But on the other hand it did not feel as meaningful as working with cats that were pushed aside by society. My last project for the consultation firm was researching promotional goods. I did this by searching for the best prices for objects that I thought would be the most memorable and fun for the customers. They had to be cheap and small, but still be large enough to be made with logos all over them to attract new customers.
During my last year at JBS, my English class focused on the topic of meaningful work and it opened my eyes to the workforce of America. It showed that the most important people in our society are the ones that give everything they are back to society. While I was working at the cat shelter I felt like I was giving back and doing meaningful work because I was personally changing the lives of the animals at the shelter. While I was working for the consultation group the work was more enjoyable at first but didn’t feel nearly as fulfilling as the work at the Animal House. The last couple tasks that I worked on with the consultation group were not very tough but were time consuming. I enjoyed all of the work that I accomplished during my May project and I hope that my blog encourages more meaningful work in the JBS community.
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