DO YOU RENT TO CATS? I once got a phone call from a woman inquiring about an apartment I had for rent. She said: “I saw your ad for a 1-bedroom apartment for rent. I have a question. Do you rent to cats?” I thought that was an oddly worded question, so I phrased my answer carefully. I said: “No, I don’t rent to cats, but I do rent apartments to people with cats.” The woman said, in a dejected voice: “Oh, that’s too bad” and hung up the phone. I never heard from her again. Although this happened many years ago, I still think about this incident occasionally and wonder what was on this woman’s mind.

A GERMAN SHEPHERD IS NOT A CAT. On another occasion, a man applied for this same apartment. On his application form, he answered the question: ‘Do you have a pet?’ with ‘Yes. Cat’. I asked him some questions about his cat, but he gave me evasive answers, so I told him that I wanted to see his cat. I asked him: “Do you have a photo of your cat on your cell phone?” He reluctantly said that he did and pulled up a picture. I looked at the photo and said: “This is a photo of you standing next to a German shepherd.” He said: “Yeah. Her name is Sophie.” I said: “I don’t understand. A German shepherd is a dog. Why did you tell me that you have a cat?” He said: “Well, in your ad, you checked off that a cat was OK, but you didn’t check off that a dog was OK.”  I said: “So you thought that if we agreed to call your German shepherd a cat, then that would make it a cat.” He said that was his line of thinking. I decided to rent the place to somebody else.