So I have my own bookkeeping/accounting service and work from home. I let the ferrets out several times a day when I'm here for their play sessions. Up till a few months ago they were all older ferrets so that only meant an hour or so at a time with them crawling all over everything I was working and then off they'd be to nap. Well now with two young ferrets in the house it's more like three hours straight of ferrets crawling over my laptop, stealing binder clips, attacking documents as they print and little Bitzy's obsession - stealing my pens. At first I would get annoyed. I'd go through about ten pens in less than two hours then go retrieve the stack of them from under my bed right by the headboard. But then I realized something - when I was tracking billable time for something I was working on instead of marking the start and end time all I had to do was start with ten pens. Knowing she steals the pens at a rate of one pen per every ten minutes I simply had to count the remaining pens and subtract that from 10, multiply by 10 minutes and there was my billable time - voila! And if I ran out of pens? I knew I'd been working too long without a break so time to kick back for awhile - then go gather the pens back up. Now I think I should expense the ferret's food and litter as "Office Supplies" for my business since she works as my time clock... [Posted in FML 6985]