Jared was still thanking his lucky stars after being saved from an appointment to have him neutered when his bad luck threw him another curve.
As the shelter worker led Jared back to confinement, they happened to pass a man and his daughter at the facility to look for a new family dog.
The girl, who looked about the age of Jared's brother, Kevin, took one look at the happy sheepdog and fell head over heels. She threw her arms impulsively around Shaggy's furry neck and hugged him. "Daddy, this one!"
Jared, taken by surprise, felt Shaggy's instincts respond to the little girl's enthusiastic embrace. His tongue lolled from his mouth and he began to wag his hindquarters.
"No," Jared tried to exert some control. "Go away," he whimpered.
"Oh, you're shy," the girl said as the dog tried to squirm from her grip. "That's so cute."
She redoubled her efforts, scratching behind Jared's floppy ears and dealing the knock-out punch to his efforts to re-assert human control over the scene.
Her father looked over the sheepdog. "Are you sure, Daisy?"
"Yes," she insisted.
"He's a bit bigger than we..."
"Please!" Daisy pleaded. "This is the one. I just know it."
Her father rarely denied her anything, and he had promised she could pick out the dog. Meantime, Jared lost himself entirely in the nearly orgasmic sensations coming from Daisy scratching behind one ear and then the other, keeping his human mind entirely off balance and unfocused.
In less than 10 minutes, a shelter employee — eager to quit work and head home — expedited the paperwork and sent father and daughter off with their new dog. The employee felt good to have managed the successful adoption and reached for his coffee when his phone rang. In trying to answer the phone while balancing the coffee cup, the inevitable happened. The coffee spilled, soaking the recent paperwork.
Of course, Jared's adoption papers, at the top of the stack, were less than legible. Picking up the form and waving it to try to dry it off, the worker only hurried the soaked paper's disintegration. The other documents were salvageable, so he took some comfort in that fact.
The worker's hope of getting home early didn't happen once the veterinarian learned that the shelter had adopted out his client's dog. A half hour later, an unhappy Mr. Webster also showed up and spent considerable time expressing his outrage.
None of that, however, helped Jared as he faced life with a new family as their beloved pet.