There’s a lot of variability. We got Roto-Borola after our old cat Buddy passed. Buddy was the best pet I’ve ever had and I miss him with all my heart, but he was dumb as rocks, which produced some good stories.

Roto-Borola immediately showed he was a quick learner and it was immediately infuriating. He realized very quickly that if he chews on my electrical wires I’ll tell him not to do that, so in a situation where he comes up to me for attention and I try to calmly explain that I’m working on something urgent for work right now and he should wait half an hour, straight to chewing on the wires so that he will have my attention. He almost never does this when he’s not actively interested in redirecting my behavior. One time, he was probably a little less than a year old, I tried giving him twenty minutes of cage time to discourage the chewing and as soon as I let him out he sprinted back to chew on them again, like now it’s not about making me play with him it’s about punishing me for the injustice I have committed.

Currently have a makeshift setup where all the wires behind my desk are blocked off by large cardboard pieces with a tiny hole cut underneath so they can run along the floor. I’ve done an extremely poor engineering job on this - it works perfectly for its intended purpose of not having my wires eaten, but anytime I need to change a cable a one minute task now takes like fifteen unless I’m willing to cede ground in our battle over eating wires.

It’s kind of amazing that I haven’t really thought about Woody Woodpecker since watching the cartoons as a kid and the animation doesn’t look familiar at all other than yeah that’s the right colors, but I could hear the laugh in my head immediately on seeing the name, without having to play the audio.