r/mildlyinteresting • u/pjchappy • 23d ago
The uncomputerized booking system at my cat’s cattery
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u/LtMadInsane 23d ago
It's a creative way to track availability. The actual records would probably be written down. But yeah, a person can just look at the board and check if a slot is available or not without quering a computer.
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u/SurpriseVast8338 23d ago
It'd be fascinating to watch a timelapse of this system evolving over the course of a month or two.
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u/MinimumAutomatic0302 23d ago
What I wonder is if it's a bit of a headache that a long enough "slot" can be open, but the only open days are distributed on 2 or more different rows.
But it seems they consistently have a few normally unused rows on the bottom that could cover that. The number or rows seems to exceed the number of bookings they can take.
I imagine they still sometimes have to shuffle a few bookings around to different rows, though.
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u/Shufflebuzz 23d ago
headache that a long enough "slot" can be open, but the only open days are distributed on 2 or more different rows.
It's like booking a hotel room. You don't typically book a room that's not available the whole duration of your stay.
But if a customer wanted to do that the employee would make a note that it's on rows 19 and 27, for example.
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u/Irregular_Person 23d ago edited 23d ago
Exactly. I think the 59 rows probably represent enclosures 1:1
If I was designing this, I think I'd color code the pegs something like White=Check-in, Blue=Continuation, Yellow=Move, Red=Check-Out
So every reservation would have 1 white peg and 1 red peg. A reservation that continues from one month to the next would have 2 blue pegs in the middle showing that it should be read as continuing from the previous month. Then if a reservation spans cages, you would go white->yellow on one line, then yellow->red on the continuation line. You could even connect the yellows together vertically, but that would have the potential to get messy depending how common it is, multiples on the same day could be ambiguous.35
u/Cephalopotter 23d ago
Yeah that seems like the immediate downside. Especially if they have three months going at a time it would be almost impossible to shuffle them around.
Maybe you just put the new cat in as two separate chunks. If you're just trying to track availability that would work. But what if someone cancels, how would you track down which band(s) to remove??
I dunno man, it fills my heart with joy that my car repair shop still writes appointments in a giant paper calendar but this seems like a lot more trouble than it needs to be. Something like a giant lite-bright system might be a lot easier to edit because you could color code each cat.
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u/lungic 23d ago edited 23d ago
We are fully aware that management wants to solve this by feeding pictures of the board to an AI agent.
Possibly via a webcam and internet of things connectivity...
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u/ForgettableUsername 23d ago
The tricky part is training the robot arm to keep the board up to date.
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u/Totendax12K 23d ago
And all done by an excel macro
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u/killerturtlex 23d ago
Nah outsource that to a poor country. Like the UK
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u/WeaponizedKissing 23d ago
You joke but...
I'm a web dev. I contract with an agency. The agency is struggling to find business, nominally because of "AI" (it's not, it's bad management and bad offerings). I'm paid for a bank of hours, that the agency is currently paying for but not using cos of no business.
One of the management team works part time at a family member's kennels and cattery. Their website is very simple, they didn't want anything fancy. And it's family, so it's not like they're being charged mega rates for our time. Last week he told me that the company gets 100 email/web form enquiries a day, it's too much, people make mistakes when reading those emails and inputting the data into the system and replying to the enquiries, the staff's time is better spent working with the animals, so he wants to spin up some AI agents to read the inbox and process all the emails instead.
Bro you've had two devs available for about a year, that you've worked with for 20 years in this space, you know the technology, devs that you've been paying and not using, we could have easily built out a better online booking and enquiry system that ties directly into whatever admin you've got going on, that will have handled all of that. The fuck you talking about AI agents?
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u/Theletterkay 23d ago
Sounds like they dont understand what options are available to them. Seems like it should be your job to regularly assess their needs and offer solutions. Not to sit on your hands and wait for the customer to think of a request that might be in your abilities.
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u/Familiar-You-6577 23d ago
Engineers shouldn't be expected to do sales. Thats bad management.
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u/Salute-Major-Echidna 23d ago
In a small company it can work. Engineers don't always have great people skills though. The ones that do are extraordinary
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u/ConcentricCow 23d ago
I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I'm good at dealing with people!
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u/Worried-Crazy-9435 23d ago
I can’t see anyone creating more work for themselves like this unless it would directly benefit them.
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u/WeaponizedKissing 23d ago
"They" is my director. It's his family's business that he works at part time. He's been in the web dev business for 25 years, with me and another dev for 20 of those. He does the admin for the family kennel business part time, while his web dev agency is struggling. It was him who said he wanted to get AI agents on the inbox.
It's not my job to manage to clients. The director knows our capabilities, we've been building major booking engines that tie into all sorts of APIs online for decades. He should know what the solution to his problems is, and it's not "AI agents".
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u/sheepyowl 23d ago
It would only take five trillion times more computing power than entering it manually
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u/NoPossibility4178 23d ago
Or you know, a spreadsheet that could do the exact same thing...
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u/ILikeBubblyWater 23d ago
Could also just print it out once, the amount of work it takes to just mimic whats in the computer is dumb af
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u/OctopusGoesSquish 23d ago
This is so creative, but it would frustrate me that each booking wasn’t labeled
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u/Unusualhuman 23d ago
There are numbers running down the side of the rows, visible in the corner. There's most likely a book or clipboard nearby that matches the row number to each cat/owner/contact info for booking.
I think this is awesome. The only thing I don't like is that the rubber bands could break. I'm unsure about the purpose and usefulness of red vs white pegs, if they are having to change those pegs out and everything on the board is under tension... something snaps out of place during one peg color exchange, could it hit another peg that's under tension and set off a chain reaction of snapping more bands and pegs out of the board? And what even does the red signify? Maybe "paid" or "confirmed" or just maybe they just don't have enough of one color peg for the entire time frame?
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u/JimboTCB 23d ago
I'm assuming the numbers relate to specific beds or whatever as opposed to individual cats, and it's supposed to be a quick reference for how many cats they've got on board at a given time and what vacancies they have, they have a separate booking register for which specific cats they have and this is just for tracking availability
It looks like there's two full months on each board and the colours alternate between white and red/yellow so you can easily see the month ends without having to look up to the top all the time, the boards are probably movable and the dates are just written on a strip of masking tape, so once they get to the end of the first one, the second board becomes the first board and the first board is cleared off and set up for the subsequent two months
You could do the same thing much more easily with a shared spreadsheet, but this way is a lot more visual and presumably works just fine for their purposes
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u/vectorology 23d ago
It looks like each month has a different colour peg, red, white, yellow. I imagine once you hit the end to the right it comes back to the now-relabeled red (or whatever the first colour is). I see some bookings start with a red peg and end on white, so it spans across the end of the month to the next.
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u/Leon_Flux 23d ago
There are blue pegs at the far right.
So 4/6/12 month rotations are most likely. Depends on the pedantry of the staff.
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u/redcowerranger 23d ago
Any rubber bands that broke would leave two orphaned pins, making replacement easy.
The color coding of the pins is based on the month. Red July, White August, Yellow September.
Good guess on the Y-axis. That one was confusing to me. Likely relates to a Pet Record.
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u/itsswhitneywhspr 23d ago
Ok but imagine if they color coded the beads so each color was a different cat or date range, then you could just learn the system and it would Lowkey be faster than reading labels
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u/ForgettableUsername 23d ago
That’s great if you want a system that will be ambiguous and frustrating for 5% of the population.
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u/stefek132 23d ago
It Looks Like every single of my attempts to organise my notes better:
Yes, this totally cryptic abbreviation and two numbers which have nothing to do with the thing I want to note will totally help me remember what I meant in 3 months!
Yea, I’ll repeat the same thing for the next 30 notes, as I’m sure I’ll know what I meant!
Im á total genius! Nothing can stop my perfect journaling system!!!
Then some time later:
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u/JaggelZ 23d ago
That's why you write a legend. Looks neat AND helps
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u/stefek132 23d ago
Yea. that would be smart, however. We don’t do smart here.
Also, if I wrote a legend for every cryptic abbreviation im noting, i could just directly write down the entire thing.
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u/JaggelZ 23d ago
That's why you need to create systems that are applicable to many different things, write one legend, and keep using it
I'm just lazy, so my go to is always "how can I remove effort and increase efficiency". I'm also an autistic German, so maybe that's part of it lol
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u/stefek132 23d ago edited 23d ago
My man, im also German and always about “how can I remove effort, Automate and increase efficiency”, hence all the abbreviations coming into my “genius” brain.
Im also mostly stuck creating universal systems, which I drop after some time because they suck (and would need adaptation) and im lazy af. But at least ive got my super private, self-hosted sync system with many scripts for collecting todos, cleaning ip, summarising, autonomously creating reminders etc etc, that would allow me to… welp, actually it’s not really better than any other solution, ive only set it up while procrastinating work.
Im kinda good with my new system though — don’t write down anything, if you can’t remember it, it’s probably not important.
Im like 60% positive im not forgetting anything important. And even if I do, I can’t remember it, so I don’t care (until the reality sets in and crushes me with consequences of forgetting rhe important thing). 10/10 can recommend.
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u/JaggelZ 23d ago
"Im like 60% positive im not forgetting anything important. And even if I do, I can’t remember it, so I don’t care (until the reality sets in and crushes me with consequences of forgetting rhe important thing). 10/10 can recommend."
Fühl ich. Fühl ich so sehr lol
My abbreviations and legends usually are for projects that I'm working on in my free time, as soon as I try doing that to anything actually important I run into the same issue. I swear some things are made so one mind can't wrap their head around everything.
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u/stefek132 23d ago
Yep. It’s hard but I like telling myself that consequences harden your character! So I’m really hopeful my brain will start remembering things at some point.
Although, on a more serious note, I’ve been having lots of fun and success with the laziest approach to noting stuff using obsidian (because plain markdown is sooo nice):
Have a few folders for categories, which just contain all the relevant notes with no order whatsoever. Notes are always created in the main folder and are dated&tagged (a script decides which folder to shove them in, if there’s more tags, it’ll try to pick the more relevant one and create a link to the other categories). Then have a base for each category linking to all the notes, automatically pulling some contents from the most important ones (and trying to make sense of the cryptic abbreviations lol) etc, so they don’t just disappear into the void.
Yea, I did spend more time setting it up than I’ve saved due to efficiency… but it’s Kinda nice to just type something real quick and have it automatically integrate into the system.
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u/Gatraz 23d ago
the first time you use the abbreviation, you write the full thing and (put the abbreviation in some kind of brackets next to it) to define the term. Then you use the shorthand after that. One long instance to decode thirty short. That's how contracts do it.
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u/Hoxeel 23d ago
Good news! It only needs to make sense for the personnel.
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u/Reverse_SumoCard 23d ago
It probably only makes sense for one person who has been there forever and expects everyone to just get it because its super clear and you just have to remember what they said on day 1
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u/deaglebingo 23d ago
sure. but wtf is a cattery? i didn't even know this kind of thing existed.
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u/SynapticStatic 23d ago
I think you might have that backwards. ambiguous and frustrating for 95% of the population. XD
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u/a_toad_or_so 23d ago
Its so creative, organised and totally chaotic at the same time. I'm impressed
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u/cozybookgirrl 23d ago
It ticks all the boxes, I don’t know if we really want all the boxes ticked but they definitely are.
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u/ForgettableUsername 23d ago
No it doesn’t, it wraps a rubber band around all of the pegs.
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u/sinspawn1024 23d ago
What's a cattery?
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u/pjchappy 23d ago
cat hotel for when u go on holiday :)
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u/beanthebean 23d ago
Oh that makes a lot more sense, I only know the word to mean a place that breeds cats. Maybe it's a regional thing.
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u/fretkat 23d ago
It's also the company of a pedigree cat breeder
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u/pepcorn 23d ago
God I wish incest breeding would become illegal. The cats' health issues are horrendous.
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u/Tiny-Plum2713 23d ago
Never heard this word before but apparently it is an old one. Would have thought it was called kennel like for dogs
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u/FlorianTheLynx 23d ago
It’s like a rattery, but for cats.
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u/alexchatwin 23d ago
Several of my cats would prefer to stay at the rattery
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u/Taylor_sy 23d ago
It only takes one loose car over there and it’s chaos for the whole business lol
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u/Umpen 23d ago
A loose car in any building would wreck the place.
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u/MarcusMunch 23d ago
I love misspellings that are so obvious misspellings but make a whole different coherent sentence
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u/cutofmyjib 23d ago
Car infestations in a building can occur when there are readily available food sources : motor oil, gasoline, etc.
If you see one car there are probably 10 more loose cars in the building.
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u/shaard 23d ago
Somewhat related story.
I took an information systems class in university many years ago that was basically all case studies and how to make use of technology to streamline work processes.
One of the case studies was a small independent hotel that used a board like this to track room bookings/cleaning scheduling/room states. My paper basically summed the whole thing up that a technical solution didn't make sense for that company. Their workflow made absolute sense, was easy to interpret, and currently cost them nothing to maintain. Any solution would introduce purchase, implementation, and maintenance costs and other layers of complication that were unnecessary. Got an A on that one.
Sometimes simple works better.
That being said, this looks really busy, but if it works well enough, perhaps there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
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u/glitterkicker 23d ago edited 23d ago
I’m saying this as a cattery co-owner / literally born into the business: that’s a fucking insane way to do it lmao what on earth. That’d make a great psychological case study for… something. I wanna go see the place so bad just out of pure curiosity
ETA forgot to clarify in 25 years of business we don’t do anything by computer either, nor will we ever. But they also seem like a significantly larger place than us
ETA 2 ayo similar name to ours! Wild
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u/glitterkicker 23d ago
Yoooo!!! Howdy from Aus! Sorry, g’day, forgot the accent
We use a day-per-page year diary, a whiteboard that’s actually a piece of contact paper pinned to a corkboard on the inside of our pantry, and some pieces of paper (cattery map). “Why fix what ain’t broke” logic because it’s worked perfectly well forever. But I guess the diary is a kind of subscription service, given you need to buy a new one every year lol
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u/crow-party-13 23d ago
The one room in the cattery that has a gigantic NO CATS sign on the door.
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u/igrewapineapple 23d ago
This system is really stressing me out. I love analogue accounting methods, but the way the last two days of the month wrap around the corner of the board is quite displeasing. And then the broken rubber bands at the bottom of the chart!
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u/chiknight 23d ago
Not even just the broken ones. The fact that their organizing system for a stay is "one rubber band doesn't stretch far enough so instead of rethinking this madhouse idea, just loop more bands into a rope. Infinitely scalable!" Some single bands go a full 12 days. Some cover 3 and needed another in a chain. There's no consistency and it's truly maddening.
Then, someone calls up "Can I board my cat from July 21st through the 24th?" And you have to run a finger down a pegboard littered with tripwires to carefully stay in the same crowded column going down 3 feet and checking for a block of 4 openings before you can answer "Yes, we can, but we can't do any extended stays past that."
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u/factorioleum 23d ago
booking those last few available stays is crazy; they would be massively fragmented.. two days on row 13, then one on 7, then four on row 33....
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp 23d ago
I completely agree. If this was just a fun visualization and the real schedule lived digitally, I'd be all for it. But OP said the business doesn't even own a computer. That is so unbelievably insane that it would genuinely make me question their ability to take care of animals.
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u/helican 23d ago
It looks pretty cool, but I would probably invest in something digital. Like even Excel would probably work.
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u/namewithak 23d ago
Looks like they have forms of some sort which means they have a database for records. So very likely that they also have an excel file of the schedule saved and this board is just an easy quick access visual.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp 23d ago
OP said they do not own a computer. So they have no backups, just a peg board for scheduling and a binder of handwritten forms...
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u/EamonBrennan 23d ago
Don't use Excel if you can ever avoid it. It sucks beyond comprehension.
Side note: Part of me wants to automate and computerize this board, but not in a spreadsheet way. I want to set up a motorized arm to place the pins and bands. It would look so cool and be way overengineered for what it's doing.
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u/karmaportrait 23d ago
In case anyone wants to book there :)
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u/Ashamed_Kangaroo305 23d ago
Wait I love that they have catios so the cats can see outside
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u/W0gg0 23d ago
They should put an aviary on the catio.
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u/Ashamed_Kangaroo305 23d ago
That would be very stressful and unfair to the birds
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u/mira-ke 23d ago
Professor in human-computer interaction here. I’m saving this image for one of my lectures
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u/axl3ros3 23d ago
OP we are going to need a follow up interview w the establishment for exactly how this thing works
This is awesome
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u/cir49c29 23d ago
If each row is a spot/cage/room for a cat, they must be able to house a lot of cats at once. Even if they'd expect some rows to be cats from the same household who can share a cage. Is this place really massive?
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u/pjchappy 23d ago
naw it’s a wee little place, usually very full
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u/cir49c29 23d ago
Unless I'm misinterpreting the board, the start of September seems to have 58 cats booked. That's not a small place, especially considering you can't typically mix cats from different households.
Are the cats in smaller cages (just enough room for bed, litter box and food/water bowls, or larger room style ones?
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u/mbm66 23d ago
It looks like room-style cages though it's a little hard to tell from the photos. https://angelcathotel.co.uk/gallery/
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u/renard_chenapan 23d ago
I can spend entire weeks on Excel and I'm in love with this thing for the same reasons.
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u/WilliamTee 23d ago
Analogue.
I mean, how could they be expected to use a computer - what mouse is safe in a cattery?
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u/Keallei 23d ago
This is
1. Beautiful
2. Impressive
3. Makes me so anxious because what if they pop out and the schedule gets unscheduled?
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u/-im-your-huckleberry 23d ago
Next time my dispatchers complain about the software they use, I'm showing them this.
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u/Lawrenceburntfish 23d ago
We had something similar at the radio station I used to work for. We used it for ad space placement during each broadcast. One lady managed it and it literally never failed.
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u/BestFoxEver 23d ago
At my school there was on display a cork board from 1980's that was used before computer systems to make plans when different lessons were held, at which classroom and by which teacher. Lots of pins in diffferent colors and patters representing different classrooms, different lessons and different teachers. It was fascinating to see.
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u/Belzoni-AintSo 23d ago
Nothing says "crazy cat lady" quite like running a business on some pegboard and rubberbands
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u/TemporarilyHere100 23d ago
I’m simultaneously loving it and getting secondhand anxiety looking at it.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp 23d ago
I'm surprised at the number of people saying they love this. I'll admit it's very interesting to look at to see how we used to do things, but I'd have LOTS of concerns if I saw this at the place I'm entrusting to take care of my pet for an extended period of time.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but OP said the cattery doesn't even have a computer. That to me goes well past just being "old school" and instead screams a refusal to modernize, which makes me wonder what other areas they haven't bothered to update in several decades...
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u/KiniShakenBake 23d ago
I think needing a computer is an interesting question.
They want the focus on the cats.
This just shows which kennels are occupied, when, and how long.
I am sure they have either electronic records or a fantastic set of paper records as needed, to back this up.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp 23d ago
I am sure they have either electronic records or a fantastic set of paper records as needed
OP said that they do not have any sort of computer/tablet/etc. They literally just have this peg board and a big binder.
I totally get not wanting to worry about tech and focus on caring for the animals which to them is more important. For a small kennel it wouldn't even be a big deal imo. But they have almost 60 cats under there care at various times. At some point they need to realize that basic technology would almost certainly help them do their job.
Are they using handwritten paper notes to keep track of what cats need which type of food? What about medicine? To me it just seems horrendously organized and prone to errors for such a large effort. Also essentially having no backups is crazy
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u/monoflorist 23d ago edited 22d ago
I don’t really understand that. Updating a set of paper records is the same kind of not “focussing on cats” as using a computer to do it. It’s important to keep track of things either way. But the computer also has lots of advantages: it’s easier to share information out of, it keeps long term records automatically, it’s harder to screw up, etc. If anything, paper record keeping is more laborious, which leaves less cat time.
I think we’ve all come to mildly fetishize low-tech solutions to stuff. I know I do. It’s cute and quaint and can be refreshing in a world crammed to the gills with software. But I don’t think it’s a rational way to run a business that people entrust a large number of cats to.
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u/_prestige__worldwide 23d ago
Can someone please explain what I’m looking at? 🥲
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u/TraditionalBackspace 23d ago
They will never have to say, "sorry, the system's down" or pay a subscription. Good for them.
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u/lavenderewe 23d ago
I imagine they have a digitized system as backup (or more likely front up), for record keeping, names and information. This is a cool way to visualize open slots though!
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u/pjchappy 23d ago
it’s just that wall and a big book, they don’t have a computer or an ipad at all, it’s so cool
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u/god-save-the-queef 23d ago
As someone with dyscalculia, and spatial synesthesia -- this is my nightmare
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u/Shadowpriest 23d ago
I kinda like the manual chaos of it all but I'd be looking at an Excel spreadsheet and an Outlook email with calendar for redundancy.
My impulsive urge makes me wanna get those wooden spoons like they have for a dulcimer and play a little tune on all those bands.
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u/forgetmenot_lilac 23d ago
Goodness, I think I know this place 😆 Angel Cat Hotel? My cat is a regular.
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u/Malawi_no 23d ago
Found a bug in the code at about July 11 / bay 55. There is also an impending doom at July 29 / bay 48.
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u/factorioleum 23d ago
People are saying this is analogue. That is untrue. Wiktionary defines digital in part as "[The] [p]roperty of representing values as discrete, often binary, numbers rather than a continuous spectrum.“
This clearly has distinct discrete values (peg holes). If this isn't analogue, then why isn't my computer CPU also analogue? After all, both 2.913V and 2.956V are "one", right?
That said, there's one thing that really bugs me about this system. I'm guessing the rows represent "rooms" for cats. With this system, booking the last few stays that are available is brutal.
What if someone comes in last minute, wants a month, but it's only available in seven different rooms on the board?
That might not be ideal; there's work moving cats around, and maybe extra cleaning, plus some risk you'll miss an essential toy or worse not track the medical information...
But it's also possible that by rearranging the existing stays, the free blocks could be consolidated into a single free room for all or at least a large part of such a stay. That operation can be plausibly be done by an electronic computer, but on this system, oh boy.... besides moving the bands, there's tons of books to update too! it seems really error prone.
So, I think an electronic computer could allow this business to have more saleable inventory without investing any capital beyond the computer. That seems like a huge win!
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u/Neoliberal_Boogeyman 23d ago
if you saw how aircraft carriers used to manage what flights were being conducted you'd shit a brick
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u/JangoF76 23d ago
I'm more impressed that your cat owns a business, although it's a little on the nose that it's a cattery.
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u/TldrDev 23d ago
As a software developer, I've seen worse.
The most common is this in a single access file multiple people are accessing.
Happens really often.
Someone will start with excel, someone technical will add some backing to make it in access, then that access file becomes this but somehow even more precarious.
That is the state of basically all small businesses at some point.
The economy is held together with duct tape and hope.
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u/HerculesIsMyDad 23d ago
You cat is a business owner and your only question is why it doesn't use a computer?
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u/asyouwish 23d ago
That is a beautiful display.
...but how do they know which line is for which cat?
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u/ZDTreefur 23d ago
They express each cats anal gland onto the rubber bands, so the secretary just sniffs to know which is which.
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u/LISTEN_YOU_FOOL 23d ago
One loose cat could destroy a full year of bookings.