External Card Reader
Pet Detective
Every pet owner wonders what their pet actually thinks. Their minds are often flooded with unanswerable questions that range from Why does she bark uncontrollably at the same mail carrier every day? to Why does she love dirty clothes so much?
Well thanks to tarot cards, South Korean pet owners need to wonder no more.
The Ace Sophia fortune-telling shop, located in the affluent Gangnam district of Seoul, helps pets communicate their deepest inner thoughts with their owners. For $14 a session, customers make appointments for their pets — including turtles and reptiles — where Hwang Soo-kyung spreads a custom-designed deck of tarot cards in front of them. All they have to do is paw a card and the conversation is afoot.
I guess that makes her the Dog Whisperer...Gangnam Style! 🎵🕺🏾
One customer, Ahn, brought in her greyhound, Khan (no relation), to see if this animal soothsayer could identify what was troubling him. Her vet and trainer both gave the dog a clean bill of health, but she didn't think either of them could diagnose Khan's feelings anyway, so she went looking for a second opinion. (Technically a third, but who's counting?) When Khan sniffed a card depicting a dog chasing its owner, Hwang explained that he was suffering from anxiety over the five pups he'd fathered.
I guess that makes him a deadbeat dog with a conscience.
With South Korean pet ownership surging as its lowest-in-the-world birth rate continues to plunge, more and more people see their pets as family. Wanting their "kids" to be healthy — both physically and mentally — very few Ace Sophia customers visit only once. As Hwang stated, "once you start asking what your dog is thinking, you can't really stop."
Can you say helicopter parent?
Credible Source
At the end of the day, Ahn really just wanted an answer for her kid's strange behavior, as any parent would. The external tests run by the vet and the trainer came back clean, but she still felt something was off. She sought out an internal test. After all, she couldn't ask Khan outright.
Unlike Khan, we can report on ourselves — and we do.
At work you receive a "Meets Expectations" rating on your performance review. On the surface it says everything is fine, but it doesn't say that you've been mailing in the work since March. Your manager commits the review to the system and moves on.
A colleague asks how you're doing, you think about your answer and determine there's nothing worth bringing up. So you hit em with an "I'm good" reply, they take you at your word — because why wouldn't they — and continue talking about work.
In both cases, the external assessment tool returned good news, so the investigation stopped.
In both cases, the internal assessment tool also came back clean, but only because the issue it found was deemed not big enough to report outward.
Every instrument used returned a clean report — including the one with internal access.
Khan got a second opinion because he couldn't file a report.
No one requests a second opinion on you because you already filed a clean report — and you're the most credible source there is.
Question of the Week
What have you labeled as "fine" but are still dealing with?
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