Friday is Take Your Dog To Work Day, a.k.a. uggh!!!

It started as most of these fake 'days' do, with some special interest group simply declaring it. Then in the age of the internet it gets picked up on a multitude of these fake day lists. Sooner or later, some catch on. Hopefully this one never does.

Friday is Take Your Dog To Work Day. It was started in 1999 by Pet Sitters International. Hmmm. Started by Pet Sitters. People who get paid to watch working people's dogs. So was this a way of them trying to get a three day weekend? Anyway, it's a day when they encourage businesses to allow their employees to bring their dogs to work all day. They say an additional benefit is to show dog-less co-workers the human-animal bond and perhaps they'll adopt their own.

Meanwhile, allergic co-workers can go screw themselves I suppose? Or what about the old phrase there's a time and a place? A park, sure. A dog park, absolutely. A dog friendly beach, why not? But the same prima donna mentality that says it's okay to take your dog with you in the shopping cart at the grocery store or carry it around like a Paris Hilton accessory into malls and restaurants now is pushing this nonsense into the workplace.

Look, if a business wants to establish their own policy about bringing pets to work, that's up to them. Personally I won't work for them, but that's their right. Etsy, Clif Bar, and Bissell all do this. But to have some organized effort to nag businesses into doing this? Give me a break.

Another pathetic thing here is that it's borrowing from the name and idea of Take Your Children To Work Day, which was originally Take Your Daughter To Work Day. That was first started with little girls to empower them and show them that a female can do anything she wants. It was a noble cause. Then it got watered down with take your children to work day, which rapidly declined into kids running around an office not learning a damn thing about what grown up work life is like but instead eating pizza, watching movies, and having a free day off from school. The only time I participated in this I actually made my kids work. They crunched demographics numbers, typed and printed out topic sheets, looked up news stories, etc.. I tried to give them an honest look at work as work.

Now we have Take Your Dog To Work Day in an effort to once again pretend dogs are the same as humans. When you're on an important call you don't need a tail thumping against your cubicle wall. When you're bringing a client down to the conference room you don't need a dog humping their leg. Call me whatever name you want but you don't need your dog everywhere you go. Time and place, people, time and place.

In a survey done by Banfield Pet Hospital in Portland, Oregon, 52% of millennials want a pet-friendly work place. 33% of Baby Boomers agree. But only 31% of Gen Xers do, proving Gen Xers to be the most rational of these groups. Will Take Your Dog To Work Day catch on? Let's hope not. For some self-absorbed nitwits it won't matter. Plenty of narcissists already think nothing of walking into businesses, either where they work or where they don't, with their dog in tow. Yet I bet half these people complain when someone brings a baby to a restaurant.