Punctuated by a schoolboy

I thought I should run a check on my internet profile, so I did a Google search.  A split second later, there I was. 

‘My cat tends to jump on and torture an older male cat we own. She’s spaid and about 8 months and the male cat hates her?’ 

The male would be a sci-fi fan.  I like the question mark.

Life is a litter of mysteries.  Do things just because you can.  You might want to cause pain.  You might do it without meaning to.  I work as an English tutor.  One of my teenage pupils told me that he’d neutered a male cat while on work experience at a vet’s. Being a boy, he was used to making errors.  Spelling, punctuation, that sort of thing.  But the neutering was no mistake.  He was told to do it by the vet.   For once, he put a glinting full stop in the right place.  His mistake, the vet said, was to cut too deep. 

Candidates on work experience make all sorts of blunders.  Like ordinary employees, they are unable to do lots of things which they have been told to do.  They arrive late for work, they put too much sugar in the boss’s tea, they over-darken the photocopies.  They cut too far into the kitten’s flesh.  On work experience, of course, you can get it wrong and no one really minds because no one is paying you.  The vet even said it wasn’t a bad job.  I wonder, do schools send pupils out to hospitals and airlines? 

Most children wouldn’t dare disobey instructions from their employer during work experience.  They want a good report.  But it wouldn’t occur to them in the first place that they might be asked to do something which was wrong.  My pupil hadn't realised.  He'd actually felt quite pleased with himself.

          When he told me about his improvised snip, I ad-libbed a short piece of my own, something about empathy – with the owner of the cat, not the cat itself.  I asked the young man if he’d want his pet cat neutered by a schoolboy.  He said no straightaway.