My Dog and Supermarket Game Theory

The dry definition of a game is “a contest with rules to determine a winner”.  I have developed a strange feeling that my dog, a small Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, is playing a continuous game with me.  Indeed, sometimes she wins but most of the time I lose.  The rules are simple.  We go out for a walk.  My objective in this newly discovered game is to have the dog do her thing (pee and poop) as fast as possible, so we can get back home quickly and return to our vegetative state.  She in her basket admiring my wife, me in front of the TV supposedly admiring the occasional female actress, but in all honesty dosing off.  Her objective of the game is the opposite.  She wants to sniff as many half wet street corner and as many half sun-dried dog crap, walk for as long as her feet carry her (which is unfair, she is four legged), and come home as late as possible.

But here’s the twist.  We both know that at a certain point, usually five or ten minutes after we leave the house, I will turn around and go home.  We both know that leaving smelly surprises around the house are not an acceptable gift for our family.  The last piece of information, by the way, works both ways.  She knows that I would find it difficult to come home and report to the boss (my wife that is) that the dog came back leaving absolutely nothing in the street.  She concludes therefore, that I will keep going until she does something.  And she’s not completely wrong, unless of course some show is about to start in a few minutes (she has no access to this confidential information).

So there we are, out in the cold street.  I want to go back home, she wants to stay out.  We look at each other and the game starts.  She walks around, and in front of my hopeful eyes gets to position.  She smells the hope and decides to go sniff something new.  Disappointment.  A few more steps, and she starts to go around as if to find the exact hole in the ground which will serve as tonight’s toilet.  She sits in the strange way dogs sit when they’re about to introduce a new smelly surprise to the world, she even looks at me with reassurance as if to say: “don’t worry, you’ll get to watch your stupid show in a minute”.  But then that bastard neighbor’s dog shows up and they’re at each other’s behind sniffing as if Chanel number 5 is a thing of the past.  The last phenomenon probably explains why our dog Linda smells the same on both ends.  Disappointment.

That’s the point that I really give up, go home, and take the risk that what happened the other night would happen again.  What happened was that I woke up at 4:00 AM thinking that in my absence, my wife had accepted a homeless horse with some serious bowel issues as a house guest.  Instead, as it turned out, our dog, who had won the game that night, chose to leave a hefty pile of warm crap in the entrance to my youngest son’s room.  And there I was, 4:00 AM, in front of a busy work day, collecting warm and stinking pieces of fresh dung, cleaning and washing the floor, opening the windows to the cold night air.  What really struck me that night was that my expectation was for a 12 lbs dog to leave behind a few ounces of poop.  Instead, I saw a pile that resembles only large zoo animals production, or alternatively, large farm animals.  How the hell could this outstanding amount come out of such little dog.  Truthfully, I started thinking about accomplices, but then dismissed it as a crazy thought of a tired person at 4:00 AM.

We’re negotiating a truce.  I do hope that we can compromise.  Forget the TV and the dosing off.  Walk me all you want, just leave my house crap free.

The supermarket is another game I play with my wife.  She prepares a list of groceries for me, and I go get it every Friday morning after I drop the kids off at school.  I know the supermarket’s pretty well.  I know where almost everything is.  When I get in, I park the cart right inside the store, and I get the list out.  I study the list,  trying to memorize it.  My objective is to make a single pass of the store, getting everything the first time.  Never returning to the same aisle.  Dorit, who’s playing the game remotely, has a completely opposite objective.  Her objective is to to have me walk around the huge store, grabbing one product at the time, moving on to the other side of the store as the cart gets heavier and heavier and its front left wheel gets nastier and nastier with each turn.  The best is at the meats section.  One must take a number and wait the long line.  Once you use your turn to get whatever kind of meat you need, the turn is over forever, and realizing that somewhere down the list another kind was somewhere else on the list (why????), I must take another number and wait the line again.

I end up at the check out line behind the only old lady in the Middle East who still uses checks for grocery shopping.  Did I mention already that the definition of game is to determine a winner?  In my dog and supermarket game theory, the objective is to determine a loser.  Me.