Before today, I never wondered whether or not my dog was still alive after taking him to a groomer.
Let me start by saying that the actual grooming work these folks do is fantastic, which is why it's an absolute shame that we will never take our dog there ever again.
Today, my wife dropped him off and noticed that the lone employee there had a baby with her (file this under foreshadowing). Typically we'll drop him off and pick him up within the hour (he's little so it doesn't take long). We didn't hear from anyone saying he was ready to be picked up for close to two hours after that, so my wife tried calling and texting to get an update, but she didn't get a response.
Since we live nearby, we decided to drive over and get some lunch if it turned out they were busy or behind schedule, and that's how we learned that the door was locked and no one was inside. We immediately (and repeatedly) tried to call and text to see what was going on (we predominantly texted because no one answers the phone by default, but when we weren't getting responses to our texts either, we started getting really concerned.
After returning home and trying to figure out if (when?) we should consider calling the police, my wife got a call saying that the one employee's baby ate something plastic and had to be rushed to the ER, and that someone else would be coming by at some point to unlock the door. Now, I understand that emergencies happen and child care is crazy expensive. However, I have some counterpoints:
1) If you're going to have a baby with you at a groomer, keep the baby in a playpen where it can't swallow random pieces of plastic (or worse -- what if this baby had tried to interact with a dog and got bit?).
2) If you have clients who depend on you because their living, breathing animal is supposed to be in your care, reach out and proactively let them know there's been an emergency and that someone is coming by to unlock the door. Dodging calls and texts for an hour is unacceptable.
3) What would have happened if we hadn't driven over there and tried calling? Would anyone have been sent over to unlock the door? Would our dog still be sitting alone in an unfamiliar building?
4) When we were finally able to pick up our dog, he had been groomed, which is great, but I'm confused about the timeline. Why weren't we called when he was groomed? Was he put back into the kennel at the exact moment the (apparently unsupervised) baby ate plastic? What the hell happened?
Our dog is okay, and as I mentioned earlier, they did a great job grooming him. However, this is not remotely worth having to hunt down an employee to determine where he was, if we had been groomed, and if he was even okay. Never again. read more