Cat sitter spending 10.mins per visit

[Catinaflatoday]

Installed a ring doorbell a month ago, which has just showed me that cat sitter spends 10 mins a visit not the 30 mins twice a day I thought I was paying for?

AIBU to think 10 min visit not enough twice a day ? 25 a day fee

I use a cat sitter now for holidays and a blink camera. My previous one spent 10 minutes a day there and I have no problem with that, not sure what else she could possibly do for another 20 minutes.
She put her prices up from £10 to £14 a visit so I found another one who charges £7 a visit for up to 30 minutes. She does food and water and sends me a picture Also sets up the auto feeder with supper and dreamies and puts the bins out. She's seldom longer than 10 minutes. Cat has a cat flap.

I would go absolutely mental!

My cat sitter is £17 per hour. So I split it to 2 x 30 min visits.

My cat doesn't need the 30 mins as she is unsociable and hates people. But my sitter just sits in the room that she is in after doing the practical stuff.

To be honest she goes above and beyond to be honest. So many pics whilst we are away, full report after each visit.

Find someone more reliable and who cares. What area are you in?

Wouldn't be so bad if they had been honest and told you 30 mins was not needed and you just had to pay for 1 30 min session split across 2 visits.

if I used a cat sitter, which I haven’t done so far, I’d want them to spend time with the cats. They like to have company. They’d wake up for a hang out too. So I’d be very upset by this. If you are specifying a 30 min visit to include playtime it should happen.

lol so £6.25 for her to travel to OP’s home

No the £25 is for 2 30 min visits.

So just have 2 15 min visits instead for £12.50

@Moonpie6 My cat doesn't need the 30 mins as she is unsociable and hates people. But my sitter just sits in the room that she is in after doing the practical stuff.

⬆️⬆️This is so true. I look after an antisocial cat, and after I've done all the food/litter etc, I stay and just be a presence in the house until the end of my visit. The client wants the cat to have company, but knows the cat is antisocial, so I potter about, listen to music or an audiobook out loud from my phone so the cat knows there's someone in the house and doesn't get lonely even if she doesn't want to hang out with me.

As an agency carer I agree. I get almost half that, and my job is a little more arduous than feeding the cat and changing the litter tray (which I do actually do for some clients). I don’t get a penny for travel time or expenses. I find peoples opinions on here get very strange when it’s animals rather than people.

No, I think that it is unacceptable for any job to not pay the NLW from the time you arrive at your first visit to the time you leave your last, minus a 30 minute or one hour unpaid lunchbreak. How do you get by on that? Why not work in a care home?

It’s not a wage, it’s not employment – the woman’s self-employed

OP has zero obligation to maintain or guarantee the hours (I doubt they have any sort of contract).

She’s not doing a 40-hour week on £25 an hour, she has zero guaranteed hours with this set up

Besides the fact that if she spends 30 mins there, it’s not £25 an hour (already low for self-employed work) – it’s likely more like £15 an hour (factoring in say 10 mins travel each way to the OP’s home).

You can’t compare an employed hourly rate to a self-employed hourly rate, it’s comparing apples and pears

Exactly. Usually by the end of the week my cat comes around and does play. No pets or strokes though.

To pay that price for a 10 minute visit then be ripped off is disgusting.

I hope the OP finds someone more trustworthy.

Because they’re bloody atrocious. All of them. With no exceptions. Also I have to work with an agency as I have young children, no family, their dad lives 4 hours away. And there’s very little childcare where I am apart from school and wraparound. All the care homes I have previously worked or applied for require you to do 12 hour shifts and at least every other weekend. Absolutely no way is an agency going to pay me from the start to the end of my day, and I actually don’t think it’s normal for the majority of jobs, it’s only on mn that they seem to think it is for a job that requires home visits. Gardeners or mobile hairdressers or personal trainers (for completely random examples) don’t charge you for travel time, like in my pp it’s only when there’s animal care involved that people get really weird about how much you should be paying

To be clear I’d bloody love to be paid for the actual time I’ve put in, but I don’t think in the ops circumstances that she’s out of order

Yep – a self-employed hourly rate is a service rate, not an hourly wage.

The unpaid hours that enable the service must be factored in.

In this case, travel time, time spent dealing with enquiries, extra for the fact that you’ve no contract so the work is completely unguaranteed day to day, not to mention no sick pay, no pension, no maternity, no redundancy, etc, etc, etc.

Yes, if you’re paying for that amount of time then you should be getting that as a service (unless t&cs state travel time etc is factored in.)

That said with my cat it would kind of be pointless if a sitter did more than food/water/litter box. She has a specific routine that she makes up minute to minute and the correct human must be available 24x7 to service her needs immediately… even if that is opening the back door at gone midnight so she can look out and sniff the air… and doing the same with the french doors and front door… before rechecking out the back door…

Read back what you’ve just written

This is insane 😆😆😆

“It’s not a job you for the money is it”

Yeah you wish, clearly!

1 x 30 min session (at £25 an hour) split across 2 visits is £6.25 a visit – right?

Tell her you know.

Sorry my maths is awful!

You SHOULD get paid travel time and expenses. I did home care work some years ago and most visits were 1 hour, likewise with unpaid travel in between every 1-hour visit and a minimum hourly wage. These agencies are simply exploitative and the conditions are poor, it’s not the benchmark to aim for. Care work and carers should be valued, not other work devalued to match.

@CheeseWisely I know!! I was surprised too, but it's been decades since I used a cattery, and not in the U.K, so I wasn't sure how this compared to others.

but yeah cheaper to book a hotel & room service 🤣🤣

Sorry I didn't read it back..I was supposed to put 'it's not a job you take for the money is it'
Although I agree in OP's case it seems a lot they're getting. I don't pay anywhere near that much which is why I was thinking that.

But your post seems to come across a bit nasty towards me?

@PrimaDoner oh I did type it right. You quoted it wrong.

The typo was mine, what you wrote was indeed

“It’s not a job you do for the money is it”

The word you’re looking for is incredulous!

Ok then. I'm not sure what you're hoping to get from me

lol nothing, I wrote my response, make what you will of it