People with their pets and phones in the bathroom
June 3, 2016 4:32 PM   Subscribe

 
Why...... why.... WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE BATHROOM WHILE YOU'RE BATHING? Haven't you people ever heard of shutting a gaddamn door?
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 4:43 PM on June 3, 2016 [20 favorites]


Using a laser pointer to dunk your cat in the bath is cruel. The rest of these are hilarious comeuppances for kitty hubris.
posted by figurant at 4:45 PM on June 3, 2016 [24 favorites]


Yeah, the laser pointer one was mean. The rest of these were pretty great ... although, those poor cats and I felt bad for laughing at them. They were so embarrassed!

I also wonder why so many people are recording their loved ones taking baths, but I guess you do you.
posted by darksong at 4:56 PM on June 3, 2016


Heeeehehhheehhe
posted by samthemander at 4:57 PM on June 3, 2016


I would imagine the overlap in the Venn diagram of "cats falling in bathtubs" and "people filming their loved ones taking baths" is a tiny fraction of the size of the "people filming" bubble itself.
posted by axiom at 4:58 PM on June 3, 2016


I hate this. I really, really hate this. Twelve seconds in and some asshole is laughing hysterically while their cat, in a panic, is frantically trying to climb out of a bathtub filled with water. They stand there and... film.

I love laughing at cats as much as the next person, but I don't like this at all. 😠
posted by mudpuppie at 5:09 PM on June 3, 2016 [62 favorites]


I would definitely pee on their bed for this.

(not even talking hypothetically as if I were a cat)
posted by ryanrs at 5:15 PM on June 3, 2016 [19 favorites]


When I was a kid, one of our cats escaped and got under the porch and then got ringworm, so we had to bathe both cats. Fezzik, who has always been a stoic, kind of aloof, very independent kitty cat, was not happy, but she took it in stride and was back to her normal self shortly after the bath. Inigo, on the other hand, who was the sweetest, kindest, cuddliest lump of a giant Maine Coon lap cat, took it like the world had caved in around him. Everything he knew to be true was clearly a lie. The people who he knew, who he trusted, who loved him put him in the BATHTUB and then got him WET and then put smelly shampoo all over him, and it was just all too much. He hid under the couch and trembled for the rest of the day. He came out when we opened a can of tuna, and ate it while trembling, and then (even though he was totally dry and had been for about 5 hours) slunk back under the couch to tremble some more.

A disillusioned cat is a pitiful thing.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:30 PM on June 3, 2016 [31 favorites]


I'll wager that the feeling of being helpless and drowning is pretty universal to most mammals.
posted by alex_skazat at 5:30 PM on June 3, 2016


I know from experience, a cat that falls in the tub will avail itself of every possible route out, including clawing straight up their human companion like a meaty, bloody, flesh ladder.

These people are lucky to be alive.

Also, stop laughing and help your poor silly cat.
posted by mrgoat at 5:33 PM on June 3, 2016 [18 favorites]


People who laugh at their pets in distress are assholes.
posted by chaoticgood at 5:52 PM on June 3, 2016 [19 favorites]


I had my tub about a quarter full of water (about three inches deep or so) one day - trying to help out early winter humidification a bit until the two humidifiers could pick up the slack. Amusingly, this was so the cat wouldn't get zapped in the nose all the time.

Said cat also loves to thump around in the tub chasing her tail.

I had to towel down pretty much my entire apartment after the cat came rocketing out of the bathroom. She spent 5 minutes trying desperately and unsuccessfully to run away from her own wet fur.

Since then she still tubthumps but she always stops on the edge of the tub first and checks before noisy tail chasing time. It's been over a year.
posted by srboisvert at 5:56 PM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


The unrepentant laughter is what makes this for me, but I'm also an unrepentant asshole.
posted by phunniemee at 5:57 PM on June 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


The only cat whose people love them is Steve, the orange cat of the lady in the bubble bath, because they are concerned that he is okay and clearly the person filming is going to go cuddle him in a warm towel after he shuts off the camera.

(Steve is a great cat name IMO)
posted by Mizu at 5:57 PM on June 3, 2016 [13 favorites]


Also I'd like to point out that nasty laugh laser person has their pants undone and fly wide open in the video.
posted by srboisvert at 5:58 PM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


I sincerely hope the first cat in this video immediately went and shat on something super important after finally getting out of the tub. It's funny when they fall in and can get out. Not so funny when they fall in and are frantic because they can't get out. Stop filming and help your pet, jackhole.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 6:06 PM on June 3, 2016 [12 favorites]


Black cats are best cats
posted by AFABulous at 6:12 PM on June 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


If I were to film my cats in the shower, which I do not intend to do, because my phone is not waterproof and I prefer not to carry it into the shower with me, because really, that's not what the shower is for, but anyway, if I were to film my cats in the shower, it would be because my cats actually demand to come into the tub when the shower is going. They hurl themselves at the shower door. (That is somewhat disconcerting. Also bad for the door.) They pry the shower door open, then come in to see what's going on. They cheerfully traipse about under the darned shower head. I have tried to convince them that they are cats and therefore should not be interested in showering, because that's sort of a core component of being a cat, unless you're a water-loving cat breed, which they aren't, but so far, to no avail.

Needless to say, the old "spritz cat with water as a last-ditch disciplinary effort" trick has zero effect in my household.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:12 PM on June 3, 2016 [10 favorites]




I had a cat who would bring mice into the (dry) bathtub to play with because they couldn't get up the slippery sides.
I had a different cat who would wade in the lake up to his elbows.
posted by Jode at 6:16 PM on June 3, 2016


There's a fine line between what is funny and what is cruel, which is really weird. But, anyway, the laser pointer one really pissed me off, it's the extreme in the bad direction, and then the final one with only a couple of inches of water was harmless and funny, the extreme in the other direction. A few of those I found myself laughing at even though the cat was having difficulty getting out of the water and was very distressed and I feel bad about that.

It's really hard not to laugh at cats being incautious and then suffering a mishap, though. Cats do some crazy stuff, like why in the world do you think that's a good idea, and then when everything is crashing down around them they are always like, what, I meant to do that, that wasn't me, it was someone else. I sometimes wonder if cats are the world's experts at physical comedy and late at night they secretly congratulate each other on their excellent performances: "Impeccable timing, Fluffnuts, you're a true artist!"
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:02 PM on June 3, 2016 [10 favorites]


We had a cat that would get in the tub with my daughter. He'd wander around with the water up to his shoulders.
They both enjoyed it. He eventually gave it up when we had to keep his chin dry because he had stitches and so he couldn't be in the bath. That cat had a few other screws loose, too.
posted by Nosey Mrs. Rat at 7:02 PM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Steve really is a hilarious name for a cat.

My next two cats are going to be called Steve and Frank.
posted by mikeand1 at 7:04 PM on June 3, 2016


i have to sit in my tub as it fills just to keep my dang cat out of it, and even then he tries to use my knees as a bridge to get to the razor or whatever. if i kept the water level below his belly, i'm convinced he'd just hang out in there with me if i let him (i don't and i wouldn't).
posted by nadawi at 7:26 PM on June 3, 2016


For people upset about these videos, have a chaser.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:51 PM on June 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


So what, this was a "people are assholes" video? I can just go to Twitter or Reddit for that.
posted by happyroach at 8:08 PM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


I used to take my cats in the walk-in shower with me to flea shampoo them. The did not pretend to like it but they never thought to climb me to get out. I think they were like "why the hell are you keeping us in this room where it's raining!"

I had a awesome little black cat that would wait till you got out of the shower and come running and lick your feet dry, this weirded out a couple of roommates and girlfriends. The cat also fetched.
posted by boilermonster at 8:34 PM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Sometimes it's humans who are jerks, sometimes it's other cats.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:38 PM on June 3, 2016 [9 favorites]


I didn't like this one either. Like, I generally don't like videos of people being mean to animals.

It's not the laughing. You can laugh all you want, because cats are hilarious. But for fuck's sake help the poor, panicking animal out of the bathtub while you're laughing.

And tricking it into falling into the tub with a laser pointer pretty clearly falls under "tormenting an animal for kicks," even if it's a fairly mild form of it. Dicks.

The Steve video was okay, but I stopped watching after that.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:42 PM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't like videos like this because it leads me to a dark place wherein I fantasize about stalking, capturing, and cruelly re-creating variations of these videos using the perpetrators as stand-ins for the original animal.
posted by some loser at 8:45 PM on June 3, 2016


I should add I stopped watching around the 12 second mark as well because I don't want to go to the dark place.
posted by some loser at 8:49 PM on June 3, 2016


I used to cat-sit a black cat that absolutely had to play in the sink with the water running for 5-10 minutes every time I came over or life just wasn't worth living. The cat would then run around all over the place with a sopping wet head. But it never occurred to me to fill the tub for him.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:01 PM on June 3, 2016


I stopped after the second cat fell in chasing the laser pointer. Those owners are assholes and deserve every savaging their cat gives them when they calm down.
posted by arcticseal at 9:02 PM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


As a kitten, my cat used to pace along the edge of the bathtub and give me headbutts in the face, and a few times when she was still quite small she'd step over onto my belly and sit on me while I was in the water. But now she is old and fat and restricts herself to sitting next to the bathtub and aggressively headbutting it while I sit in the water, which is good, because if she got up on the edge and then fell in, oh, god, I would bleed all the blood there is to bleed.

She'll hide in the empty tub when I vacuum, though.
posted by palomar at 9:13 PM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


"The Steve video was okay, but I stopped watching after that."

The last one was totally fine, I think. There was only about an inch of water in the tub, just about halfway up where it curves at the bottom, so the cat wanted a drink or something and stepped down to the curved part, started to get a drink, slides down and into the water and then keeps trying to step up the curve out of the water and slipping, eventually jumping out of the tub. No real peril or serious panic, just cat hijinks.

"But for fuck's sake help the poor, panicking animal out of the bathtub while you're laughing."

I'm not critical about that because in my experience it never improves things when you try to grab a panicking cat and, in fact, tends to make them even more panicky. Plus, there's a huge chance they will injure you. If I were in that situation with my cat, I think I'd want to help her, but I'd restrain myself while thinking that she's very, very likely to get out on her own, but then if she continued to have trouble, I'd go ahead and risk it. It's probably the case that some of those people were thinking about it like that, and then some of them just weren't worried or sympathetic at all. I'm not excusing the latter group. But it's hard to know which is which.

"I had a awesome little black cat that would wait till you got out of the shower and come running and lick your feet dry, this weirded out a couple of roommates and girlfriends."

My cat waits for me to turn off the shower, then jumps up onto my shower chair while I dry myself off. She licks the water on the chair and such. It's one of her favorite things. Whatever makes her happy, I'm okay with it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:19 PM on June 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


(also Steve has been on my list of future cat names for a while now, right below Dave from Accounting, because come on, that's a great cat name. Sorry, can't come to happy hour with you, coworkers, gotta go home and feed Dave from Accounting. Oh man, Dave from Accounting took the foulest dump last night and then just ran around my apartment like a crazy asshole. The possibilities are endless. Yes, I'm single.)
posted by palomar at 9:24 PM on June 3, 2016 [23 favorites]


But for fuck's sake help the poor, panicking animal out of the bathtub while you're laughing.

I learned the hard way to be very cautious about reaching to help a panicking cat. Standing back and letting them figure it out is usually safer, as long as they aren't in actual danger.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:35 PM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


Dave from Accounting, meet my friend Catherine.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:55 PM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I only watched maybe a third of that before giving up. About half those cats look like they were tricked or pushed into the water by someone waiting there with a camera to film it, which just doesn't seem nice or fun at all.

And even if they all had been genuine accidents, one sad wet cat after another isn't very entertaining either.
posted by Peregrine Pickle at 10:14 PM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Videos of animals in distress are not amusing.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:29 PM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I came to see some cute cat videos, but man, that really bummed me out.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 10:57 PM on June 3, 2016


Using a laser pointer is a seriously asshole move. The segments I liked were the ones where the laughter had a genuinely surprised, "oh no, what's happening!?" note. Can we get a hypercut of just those?

And I've gotta get video of our cat in the empty tub. She's pretty funny, no water or humiliation required.
posted by Lexica at 12:13 AM on June 4, 2016


I learned the hard way to be very cautious about reaching to help a panicking cat. Standing back and letting them figure it out is usually safer, as long as they aren't in actual danger.

I completely agree, but those first people were not considering the best way to help the cat kitten, they never considered any way to help it. It's a lesson I learned during the first earthquake tremors I experienced with my cat, which is why I learned how to deactivate him to put him in the carrier. Because my number one concern is protecting him and keeping him safe. Even if that kitten was skittish he could have been boosted over the side by pushing up his feet. But the worst part about it is, when it fell into the tub it slipped underneath the bath caddy so it was literally trapped underwater. It actually overturns the caddy trying to get to the surface. How do you not, at that point, instinctively reach to move the caddy? It's awful.

Videos of cats miscalculating jumps and falling off things are usually funny because it's sudden, it's unexpected, and you immediately know the cat is okay, so laughing at the indignity is harmless. That first video should be called "kitten struggles to save itself from drowning."

Closer to home, I don't have a bathtub but I have a large shower and my cat sometimes pads around post-shower, when there's still a bit of water on the ground. If he's hanging out in there pre-shower, it will usually takes a generous turn of the faucet before he'll vacate. I think it's mostly sudden water, like the spray bottle, that he's really afraid of.
posted by Room 641-A at 3:26 AM on June 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Cat people: why don't cats like water, and why do specifically black cats like swimming? This is confusing.

(I did have cats as a child, but the issue never came up, so I didn't think about it).
posted by mumimor at 4:47 AM on June 4, 2016


Nope, even if you didn't push or trick the cat into falling into the water, I don't find it amusing to watch a terrified animal struggle. About 15 seconds in I wanted to throw the laughers into a huge, deep well with slippery sides.
posted by HuronBob at 4:56 AM on June 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Cat people: why don't cats like water, and why do specifically black cats like swimming? This is confusing.

There are some amazing videos of jaguars diving into rivers to catch large caimans, but I've never had a housecat that would tolerate water at all. Over the years we had to bathe them a few times and it was always a miserable process for all concerned, and woe betide you if your grip on the scruff of the cat's neck ever slipped in the middle of it all.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:32 AM on June 4, 2016


Oh good, so my M isn't the only tub kitty. She's figured out over the years that the best way to get me to hurry along in the morning is to jump between the shower curtain and the wall of the tub and meow at me. Except the couple of times she didn't look first and jumped in while the tub had some standing water in it. Oops.

But otherwise it seems like her favorite water is tub water - she'll follow you in to the bathroom all day long and harangue you until you get a little water dripping from the spigot, then she'll drink away. I stopped wondering why kitty has a wet head years ago.
posted by Kyol at 6:44 AM on June 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I had a awesome little black cat that would wait till you got out of the shower and come running and lick your feet dry

yeah, every one of my past puppers has been a post-shower leg taster. the most recent was a stealth sidewalk leg taster and many innocent unsuspecting sweaty joggers were carefully and sneakily ankletasted while waiting to cross the street. every last one of them reacted to her with utter delight.

most cats of my acquaintance have been nose tasters and toe attackers and fortunately have never confused the two.

i don't want to watch this video
posted by poffin boffin at 9:09 AM on June 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Chaplin is a water loving kitty too. He loves to hop in the bathtub after one of us takes a shower and drink from the spigot. (He will also follow you into the bathroom and hop into the sink so he can drink from the faucet when you turn it on to wash your hands.)
posted by SisterHavana at 9:19 AM on June 4, 2016


Steve has been on my list of future cat names for a while now, right below Dave from Accounting

Her: Who are you talking to?
Me: It's Jake from State Farm.
Her: Well, Jake, you sound hideous!
Me: Jake from State Farm's a cat. And he's adorable.
posted by roquetuen at 11:15 AM on June 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Steve has been on my list of future cat names for a while now, right below Dave from Accounting

My hairdresser has a cat named Steve, and my boyfriend's neighbors' have a cat named Dave. But don't think the rest of it is "from Accounting", sadly.
posted by weathergal at 5:17 PM on June 4, 2016


"He loves to hop in the bathtub after one of us takes a shower and drink from the spigot."

Yeah, my former apartment had a leaky tub faucet that was perfect for my cat. I ended up just having that be her water supply. Which was great for everyone until it turned out that some of the water was running along the tub to the wall and leaking down into the apartment below. So that was fixed and my cat had to learn to drink waterdish water again. So sad.

For those not familiar with cats, there are a few breeds that like water. It partly has to do with some wild cat lineage in some cases. I think that Maine Coons like water and they can be traced to Norwegian Forest Cats. And some of the actual wild cat species, which have occasionally been bred with domestic cats, also enjoy water. Among the big cats, tigers swim and like the water, which is something to be aware of if you've got tigers nearby. Then there are just individual domestic cats that idiosyncratically like water. Cats are effing weird, man, they can be like 90% one way and then occasionally, and individually, completely be another way just to confuse us. My cat is mostly completely a typical cat except that she comes running just like a dog when I call her. From anywhere in the house. I give her tons and tons of attention, so I think she just likes me. It's still kind of weird.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:30 PM on June 4, 2016


Oh yes. We had a leaky bathtub faucet a couple months ago. Chaplin was not pleased when we got it fixed.
posted by SisterHavana at 7:05 PM on June 4, 2016


The difference between the nasty fucknuggets in the first two films and the third person's "oooh, it finally happened!" are, for me, all the difference in the world. And those first two teaching their kids that this is what fun is, Jesus Christ...,
posted by Iteki at 7:27 AM on June 5, 2016


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