Internet Happy Places

My Internet Happy Place: May I Recommend Dogs

At the end of a year in which we could not explore much IRL, team OneZero is sharing our favorite places we found online.

It is generally frowned upon for a wife and a mother of three human children to say that, most days, her favorite thing in the world is her dog. And yet, my dog is pretty amazing. But I also love other people’s dogs, and this year I really didn’t get to pet enough of them. Naturally, my favorite place on the internet was anywhere where the dogs are.

In 2019, only one person on my team had a dog, but now most of them do. And since I spent the majority of 2020 staring into my co-worker’s apartments from the screen on my MacBook Air, I also got to see and hear their dogs. Some of them pushed their snouts into laps and slobbered on keyboards, and others squeaked their toys so loudly that they derailed the entire meeting. But it’s not the dog’s fault that her person doesn’t know how to properly mute himself on video calls.

There are still a few of my co-workers who don’t have dogs yet, so I spend most of my free time on PetFinder, trying to help them find one so they can live a full life. When they start ignoring my messages, I turn to TikTok, where I have trained the algorithm to show me only videos of dogs, and mostly only dogs that sit like distinguished gentlemen or form cliques. I also follow dogs on our companywide pets Slack channel, and, obviously, dogs are the only thing that makes Twitter and Instagram tolerable. I even joined a new social network called Telepath, mostly because it had a #DogsofTelepath channel.

I know everyone isn’t in the position to get a dog right now, especially since those of us who work from home won’t be doing so forever. (I hope.) But the internet, as always, has you covered.