Resting after working up a sweat on our day off at Muir Beach
Spring, 2011.
This is a website about living AND working with my best friend Bob the Dog, and a few humans and other dogs that have crossed our paths, with a special emphasis on the working part. The Blog page starts as a chronology of our history together, but I’m not promising to keep the timeline untangled forever! By the way, take a second to look to the left margin and see the button labeled “Subscribe”. Bob would LOVE it if you would fill in your email address, click the button, and our highly trained robots will send you an email whenever a new article gets posted here. Don’t worry, it’s FREE, and we won’t give your info to anyone else. You’ll just have to prove you’re not a robot by figuring out one of those crooked letter puzzles, and respond to the email that appears in your inbox. It appears on every page, so you can browse around first and decide later, but PLEASE, Bob’s begging you to do it! And tell your friends – he wants to be star! Speaking of whom…
Bob and I have been inseparable since we first met. For 7 years he spent almost every day with me at my store in Minneapolis, the College of Comic Book Knowledge, where he was well-known in the Uptown neighborhood as “the comic shop dog”. When we moved to California, it took me about a year to end up in a job with , where I could NOT be his Co-Worker, that being a tour guide out of San Francisco. For about a year and a half, he was left alone or with roommates while I worked because, contrary to my naive fantasy, the State of California does NOT allow just any old dog on a tour bus! Or even one as exceptional as Bob, with exceptions made for Service Dogs. We made up for it by starting to explore the Bay Area and beyond on foot and in the car. I tell Bob it was for him that I morphed from behind-the-wheel tour guide into an office worker at the company, eventually graduating to one of two operations managers. Our boss was nice enough (and a dog-lover) to let me bring him in and so began almost 4 years of Bob being a 9 to 5-er, or more like a 7 to 7-er, the way it worked out most of the time. In 2009, Extranomical opened a new Fisherman’s Wharf office at the Cable Car Turntable at Taylor and Bay in San Francisco. And for a few months, as he had done for so many years at the Comic Book College, Bob enjoyed returning to his role as “retail greeter”.
Bob waiting for the crowds to gather at the Cable Car stop
I have recently emancipated myself and Bob from the commute and long office hours, in order to move into more creative pursuits, including this website and others. We miss the cameraderie and interaction with such a variety of people. But the blogosphere and other spheres are calling and what you are reading now is only the first of many in the planning. The goal here is to get me to write regularly, and hopefully entertain some of you along the way. But that’s not all. I intend for this to be a place where a certain type of dog-lover can contribute to a unique view of the special relationships we often build or just find ourselves in. Long ago when dreaming about this day, I had little more than a vague idea of what to write about, and Google found “Dog is My Copilot” (an irreverent partial anagram of a famous book and film about a WWII fighter pilot) was already taken (although not really used as such currently). Over 6 years on the job as a guide, I’ve seen the incredibly moving Guide Dogs for the Blind practicing and TEACHING their future masters on practice field trips in Muir Woods National Monument. Because Bob has been MY Co- worker for about 11 of our 15 years together, a quick search resulted in registering this blog’s name. There are thousands of sites with cute pictures, and I may even show you a few myself, but I decided to celebrate the rich history and culture of dogs (and other pets) that do more than just look cute and warm our laps – not that there’s anything wrong with that! I’ve always been amazed by dogs (and horses and other animals, for that matter) that work WITH and FOR us humans. Performers, Guide Dogs, watch dogs, Working with Dogs, Dogs coming to work with us, and dogs that are actually part of the workforce - that’s what I hope to cover in this blog.
I’ve spent several months writing about the last 15 years, and now it’s time to cover the present. I have plans to find interesting DHR’s (dog-human relationships) and bring them to you. If you have ideas, hints, critiques, arguments, or dates for either one of us, hit the menu item called “Questions, Fido?” and tell us where to go! (Please state it in the form of a question.) So SUBSCRIBE already. You don’t want to miss any of it!
All photographs, including the awesome banner slide show, are either by me, Ralph Gregory Johnson, or an occasional helper who used my camera to take the rare pictures with me in them.
Please visit and subscribe to my other blogs – if it’s a link, it’s live, if not, it’s still in the planning stages:
College of Comic Book Knowledge
Beatles Photo Album
We Hold These Truths.us – Civics lessons for Lazy Americans – Politics the way it SHOULD be
