"As it turns out, the rich are drawn to exorbitant prices like moths to a flame — and so it was after I bumped my rates up..."

"... to three figures that the app started delivering me one bejeweled Bichon after another. I’d drag a suitcase onto the subway and, for weeks at a time, live in some stranger’s sprawling penthouse. I dogsat a schnauzer for a real estate tycoon who I was certain had CCTV cameras trained on me in the bedroom as I slept; a nervy, Xanax-needing French bulldog for a Hollywood bigwig; a trio of overweight dachshunds that had never stepped foot* on the street below, having been trained, rather horrifically, to do their business on the balcony.... Over [a] decade I twirled through hundreds of lives... but I learned nothing about what it meant to care for — to raise — another living creature. That didn’t happen until the pandemic hit, when an animal shelter I volunteered with asked if I could foster a frightened, deer-eared mutt who’d just had a front leg amputated.... Poca is deeply wary around other dogs, which is what finally brought my moonlighting as an on-call caretaker for New York City’s Fidos and Bellas and Discos to a close."

Writes Amy X. Wang, in "What I Learned Dogsitting for New York City’s Opulent Elite/In a city of yawning class inequality, some side hustles let you glimpse how the other half lives" (NYT).

Rich people bad. Rescue dogs good. Care because paid bad. Care because love good. 

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* It was only a week ago that I blogged about the phrase "stepped foot" (as opposed to "set foot").