The Client Who Named Her Cat After a Discworld God

Pulled a chart for a routine annual exam a couple months back and the cat’s name stopped me mid-sentence. Om. Just Om, no explanation on the intake form, which for a second I assumed was some kind of yoga thing until the owner came back to the exam room and I actually got to ask her directly. Turned out she’d named the cat after Small Gods, specifically after the tortoise-shaped god from the book, which she said fit because the cat had shown up scrawny and half feral and now, a year later, was this enormous, imperious, mostly indifferent house cat who acted like he’d always been in charge of the place.

We ended up talking Discworld for a solid five minutes while I should’ve been finishing the exam, which almost never happens at work, most small talk in an exam room is about the pet’s diet or whether the shedding is normal. She’d read most of the series and had opinions about which ones actually hold up, we argued a little about whether Small Gods works better as a standalone entry point than the books everyone tells you to start with instead, and I walked out of that room in a genuinely better mood than I’d been in all morning.

I think about it more than the interaction probably deserves, honestly. Not because it was some profound moment, it was five minutes about a cat’s name. But it’s a good reminder that the stuff I write about here isn’t some separate compartment from the rest of my life, it leaks into actual days at actual work in ways I don’t always expect. I didn’t bring up board games or books to her. She brought Pratchett to me, through a cat’s chart, completely unprompted.

Om the cat is doing fine, for the record. Good bloodwork, mildly judgmental about the whole visit, exactly as advertised by his name.