As a cat sitter, I do pick up a lot of ‘trick of the trade’.

Some of them I learnt from mistakes…(oh yes, I do make mistakes and I don’t want to think about them right now…)

But my mistake is your gain.

Trick of the Trade (TOTT) is a series where I will tell you all about them. Some of them can be useful to your own cat(s), while some of them might be (hopefully) entertaining to you to brighten up your mid-week.

I ALWAYS ring the bell before turning the key to enter a presumably empty house, when I am cat sitting.

Because more than once, I turn the key and someone is still inside the house.

This most often happen on the first day or the last day of a booking.

My customer could have sent in the wrong booking date. Or it could be a case of flying through long haul and forgetting to add one more day to make up the time zone difference, or people realise their flight comes in early in the morning and don’t really need a visit that day.

Or once I have customer who overslept and missed the flight altogether.

So I ALWAYS ring the bell before entering a property.

Plus, if burglary is ongoing inside, the last thing I want is to open the door and we are at a standstill.

I ring the bell, if someone is inside, hopefully they will panic and start making noises or weird light from torches. If I see that, I can leave the scene and call 999.

The only exception is, if the cats inside are very nervous, then I wouldn’t do that in case they are scared. But I will still going ‘hello hello hello?’ once I got into the house. Just to be sure…

Who say cat sitting is all about fluffy purring cats?

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