Saturday 11th November 2000
Lee reports on choosing a new hamster


In the old days, choosing a hamster wasn't that difficult.

Having prepared the compartment beforehand, we would get in the car bound for a selected pet shop and choose a bright-eyed rodent that was both inquisitive and alert, who had a good coat of fur and who seemed playful.

That all changed with George, however.

Now we have to make sure we can communicate - not only that, but that the new hamsters are literate. After all, our commitment to support the Rodent Weekly by adequately maintaining at least one reporter means that, to prevent me from having to type what's being dictated, they have to be able to work through the night on their own.

We were thankful, however, that pet store owners are careful to send their young hamlets to Rodent College or, if they live too far away from such institutions, encourage their new borns to begin correspondence courses to obtain the appropriate degree. This made choosing a pair of hamsters much, much easier but, in the end, decided to opt for one with just such a qualification hung within the cage and another who was willing to be taught by his fellow rodent when obligations at the Rodent Weekly gave time for instruction.

Being sixteen weeks old as they were (their birthday was 'forgotten' by the pet shop owner and the hamlets' own remembrance had to do with diurnal revolutions of saturn eclipsing the equinox of Neptune which made no sense to us at all) meant that they had already been attending a suitable college and had been using the pet shop owners' computer throughout the night. Well, when I say 'computer', I actually mean the till which they mistakenly thought was a Windows 98 rebootable Pentium III super computer. It was only when we brought them home and the real keyboard 'confused' the literate one that we began to realise that we had a whole lot of training to do. It was all very well to get the hamsters to charge and ring up amounts for transactions, but a list of prices on doggie products hardly constituted a RW article, did it?

Both hamsters were slippery customers - not literally, you understand - for they wriggled and squirmed whenever the owner went near them to place them into the box and she recoiled in pain when a large chunk was taken out of her finger by the more, shall we say, spirited of the two. I could understand their confusion, however, for she'd just been handling some peanuts and was obviously mistaken for a piece of food - I've never understood why women who handle rodents put on flowery-scented perfume for this very same reason, either.

Throughout the entire journey home, however, the rodents remained silent and we began to wonder whether, perhaps, these were mute hamsters, deceptively sold to us by a clever owner who had been unable to dispose of them to anyone else. After all, who would, these days, buy two hamsters that they couldn't communicate with?

The introductory first half hour was also worrying, the small one boxing any finger which came near to it while the larger and brightly coloured one sniffed them nonchalantly as if to say 'So what?'

But it wasn't until I'd been out that afternoon and gone upstairs to send and retrieve my email that I found a letter in my outbox addressed to the GFO in Washington which read:

'Helpz! Som big and beaded hooman hass hamnapt me an my brotter frum a pet shop in the villidge. I found yer eemull adrress on thiss cumpoter and thort ewe mite bee abul to help uz. Pleaz ring the polliss. =H='

This last signature, incidentally, is the normal, approved way for literary hamsters to denote their species when emailing a human, the equal signs corresponding to their whiskers. It was obvious to me that one of these two had been upstairs, switched the computer on and prepared a desperate email to someone they considered to be a friend (if they only knew!).

Confronted by a hardcopy print out of the email, both hamsters pretended to test whether it was food by pulling on the extended sheet and it wasn't until much later when the reply came from the GFO that all wasn't as they supposed and that they'd managed to be bought by two very caring owners that they squeaked.

It was unavoidable, they told me, but necessary. They'd been warned by their mother to test any human that bought them, to see if they were reliable. Now that they were sure, they could safely chat on a one-to-one basis and would hold conversations with us in the future - only, it had been an arduous day and they really needed some shut eye.

And so began the epic saga of our next two pets...er...

...oh dear...I almost forgot...what shall we call them?

Lee the human doesn't write at all for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.

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