Pancake and Waffle (Part III)

When the boy first brought up the topic of owning hamsters he made sure to let us know that they needed to be “Roborovski dwarf hamsters” or just Dwarf hamsters for short… or just Robos for even shorter.  He informed us of this roughly twelve hundred times a week because, you know, grown-ups forget stuff.

He’s helpful like that.

A couple of weeks before Christmas I bought him a book on the care and feeding of these critters so he would know what to do before he earned them by completing his guitar challenge.  I know, I know… I mean, a whole book? Pfft.  Everyone knows that the right and proper  way of learning how to do anything is to feast upon the vast cornucopia of bite-sized, sugar-coated chunks of online how-to!  That way you can become an insufferable expert in a hyper-specific field of your choice right away without being bothered with things like “depth”, “historical background”, or “storing things in long-term memory for future use”.

(Note to self: sign up for anger management class after telling those kids to get off my lawn.)

The book I got him is well written and is filled with a lot of interesting facts about these amazing creatures.  What they eat, how much space they need, social interactions (both with people and with other hamsters) – good stuff.  

If I were to write a book like on this topic it wouldn’t be nearly as useful:

You can tell the difference between a real Roborovski dwarf hamster and a randomly-wind-blown wad of dryer lint in the following ways

• Robo hamsters cost about $12 each.  Dryer lint is usually less expensive.
• Robo hamsters have large active eyes that make them trick you into thinking they are much, much smarter than the dryer lint.  Balls of dryer lint lack such affectations.   
• Chunks of dryer lint eat much less sloppily and noisily than Robos.
• Cats enjoy playing with Robos waaaaayyy more than they do playing with wads of dryer lint (more on that later).
• While both wads of dryer lint and Robos prefer dark, hidden places over open, well-lit ones, only the Robos are known for hitting the treadmill in the middle of the night.  Like, a lot.  And they are really bad at it… Probably because of the previously discussed lack of smartness.

You get the idea…

The cage at PetSmart came with a “starter kit” that included food, fluff, some translucent tubes, a water bottle, and a treadmill.  How convenient!  “And this cage is good for Robos?” we asked. “Oh, yes!” cheerfully lied the lying salesperson, referencing us to the lie that was printed on the box. Ok.  Great!  We took the $70 minimum-security prison home, set it up on the boy’s desk in his room and returned to the store to get the twelve-dollar hamsters.

We saw a bunch of Robos had haphazardly stacked themselves in a far corner of one of the displays.  They were awake and docile.  Five tiny pairs of eyes stared at us, warily.

“Which one do you want,” asked the salesperson.

“Actually I want to get two.  The book I have says that they are territorial and they might fight each other. I would get one but I don’t want it to be lonely… these ones seems to get along”, he said, pointing to the pile in the shadows. “Will that be ok?” “As long as they are from the same litter and have plenty of space to move around, they usually get along fine,” the salesperson responded.  “If they start hurting each other you can bring them back.”

“Ok.  I’ll take… that one,” said the boy, pointing to the pile.  “This one?” asked the salesperson, also pointing.  “Yes!” said the boy.  The wife and I looked at each other and shrugged.  It was clear that our son and the clerk had connected on some sort of a cosmic level well beyond the normal human range of senses because, to us, they were all precisely the same.

The clerk slowly reached in…

Aaaannnnddd… cue “Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance”… ACTION!

The peace was shattered, and the hamsters immediately went all multi-ball, racing around and frantically leaping over each other in a desperate attempt to evade the fleshy claw machine slowly descending from above. Picture a less organized and way more adorable and clumsier “running from Godzilla” crowd scene from a 1950’s monster movie. 

Yeah… That’s about right.

I was thinking “No way is she going to grab the right one” when “the right one” dashed inside of a translucent hunk of plastic tubing and hunkered down, knowing for sure he was safe in there.  The salesperson deftly grabbed the tube and gently deposited the little guy into a container about the size of a Happy Meal box.  The second “right one” was captured in exactly the same way because he didn’t pay attention before, and he didn’t have time to look up the “How to Escape a Human Who is Slowly Reaching for You” video on YouTube that had the most “likes”.

The box was closed, we paid the bill, and we happily headed home.

(To be continued...)