Remember OCTSD? Well after being seemingly free of it for a long while, it struck back with a vengeance a little over 2 years back. And I am still recovering from it. For those of you who can bother going through by previous posts to find out wtf is OCTSD, it stands for Obsessive Compulsive Terrible Shopping Disorder, a rare incurable affliction that has seen me hoard tons of things I will never use.

It was just another normal day in the August of 2010. I still remember it as vividly as if it was yesterday. I was doing normal things on the interwebs, yep, normal things. Now internet can be a very dangerous place. You have to be constantly on alert to tackle serious threats like hackers, viruses, phishing, people-on-gtalk-whom-you-cannot-block and work emails. And then there is OCTSD lurking around, constantly pushing ads in your face. Thankfully the ads are so retarded it would take a nuclear strength dose of OCTSD for me to click on them.

So there I was doing normal stuff on internet, like going through a website that lets you buy and sell stuff. Yup, totally harmless for someone recovering from OCTSD. I might as well have snorted 50 lines of coke. And on this website, whose name rhymes with a site that is full of deluded idiots who think they are photographers, I stumbled upon photo of a cat. Now normal people on seeing a cat either go “Awwwwwwww” or “Nom Nom”. I? I whipped out my wallet and placed the order for the cat before my brain could recall that I am a dog person. Yes I bought a cat. I bought a cat off the internet. I bought a cat off the internet that is full of free cat pictures and videos. You never thought OCTSD was this serious, did you?

Any way so 2-3 days later I found myself at Bandra station along with my flatmate Pseudo Bengali holding a green plastic basket with a tiny creature inside. This creature was supposed to be a female British Longhair cat, supposed to be 2 months old and her name was supposed to be ‘Suzy’. Wonder why so many supposeds in the previous sentence? Well I am supposed to get back to them eventually.

I opened the green basket and looked inside. There was this lump of grey fur with two big buttons for eyes. WTF! I bought a stuffed toy????? Oh wait it moved. We both gave each other WTF looks and then she meowed. Crap! It’s alive! It’s alive! Now I panicked. Cat food, cat poop, litter box, cat hair, more cat poop, meows, scratch, scratch, scratch, and bam! WTF had I done! Thankfully PB had literally grown up with cats so he told me to relax. Which I did by handing him the basket and running away till he called me back.

We decided to take the auto back to Candyville. Suzy decided she hates auto rides and kept trying to force her way out of the basket. Finally at one point PB decided enough was enough and he took her out of the basket and cradled her like a child all the way home. We came home and opened the basket. What followed next was 2 hours of sniffing every square inch of the apartment, completely ignoring us in the process. Within a couple of hours of her discovering us, we were already insignificant minions.

But cats are like that. Only they can decide if you are worthy or not. There is nothing you can do to change that. This had all the wrong signs for my self esteem. In hindsight, the cat was only preparing me for real life. My adventures with the pussy will continue. Maybe I should call this the Billi Diaries?

Here is Silver giving me that WTF look:

Silver had mastered the obey me or die look at that early age: