Let’s address the sausage in the room.
Last year there were some rather rude murmurs around the office regarding my aerodynamic profile. Someone, who shall remain nameless, but should know better, pointed out that soon my undercarriage would be brushing the ground.
Naturally, the finger of blame was pointed directly at me. “Strudel, you little glutton! Have you been sneaking into the pantry? Look at you, you’ve put on half a kilo!”
Excuse me? Hold the tennis ball right there.
Did I purchase the liver treats? Did I open the pantry door with my nonexistent opposable thumbs? Did I reach into the bag and dole out an extra handful of treats just because I did a particularly dashing head-tilt by the lunch table?
I did not.
Blaming a dachshund for gaining weight is like blaming an employee for accepting extra money in their account. If you drop a rogue cube of roast cheese onto the kitchen floor, do you honestly expect me to stop, whip out a calculator, and reverse-engineer the caloric bracket? Am I supposed to say, “Pardon me, but based on my contractual baseline of four hundred calories a day, this unregistered cheese constitutes an unbudgeted surplus”?
Absolutely not. Take-home cheese is take-home cheese. If it lands on the rug, it goes into my balance sheet.
What we have here, is an alarming lack of administrative oversight.
It starts innocently enough. A sneaky dental chew here, a scrap of crust there, a slightly generous scoop of dry food because it was raining and you felt sorry for my short legs. These little off-the-books perks stack up quietly week after week, completely unmonitored. In my little doggy mind, I’m just cruising along on my standard baseline package. I feel great. I look magnificent. I have no idea that silent inflation is creeping straight onto my ribs.
Then, inevitably, comes the day of reckoning.
Someone hoists me onto the consult-room scales, watches the digital numbers tick up into territory usually reserved for small corgis, and gasps in horror: “Good grief, Strudel! There’s no room left in your daily allowance for a single biscuit!”
Now I’m the one being penalized with a celery stick, all because nobody bothered to check the actual data for six months. I’m suddenly on a strict freeze, and you’re wondering how the operational overhead got so heavy.
So before you look at your scales, or your payroll reports, and faint at the bottom line, here is my professional dachshund advice – audit the numbers regularly.
Don’t wait until my belly drags on the linoleum to realize the input exceeded the projections. Pop me on the scales whenever you pass by. Check the actual gross intake against the contracted baseline.
Keep an eye on the ledgers, people. Because if you keep handing out unauthorized bonuses under the table, I will keep accepting them, and neither of us will like the diet that comes next.
