Beware of Dog, Cranky Mom

Our neighborhood attracts a steady flow of door-to-door salespeople and proselytizers. Before I began working at home and caring for a baby who tends to get upset when the doorbell rings and the dog goes berserk, it was a minor annoyance. It is now officially a major pain in my ass – enough so that it prompted me to post the following warning next to our doorbell.


I drafted that message after a weekend of uninvited visitors, beginning with a man and woman who came to our door at 9pm on Friday night. We were all relaxing in our living room, Lana asleep in John’s arms, when the doorbell rang. Rico immediately jumped off the couch and began barking an alarm so loud and high-pitched that it could melt eardrums, not to mention wake up a sleeping baby. I opened the door expecting to find our neighbors in the midst of some kind of emergency. Instead I was greeted by two strangers hawking free carpet cleaning services with a laminated sliver of paper that made them look not quite as official as Napoleon Dynamite’s Tupperware-selling brother and uncle.

I quickly informed them that their carpet colleague had already been by the week before, and I still wasn’t interested. “Oh, you mean Bill?” the woman asked, like I committed to memory the name of random salesmen who came to my door. “I don’t know if it was Bill, but I do know that I’m not interested,” I told her. “Well, I’m not interested either, but I can’t go home until I sign up one more person,” she responded. I don’t know if it was the sound of the crying baby or the glowing red of my eyes, but at that point the man grabbed the woman’s arm and began backing away. “Have a good evening and congratulations on the baby,” he said as they retreated, and I swear he held out his free arm like he was preparing to fend off an attack from a Grizzly Bear.