When it gets too quiet, David Murphy starts to realize that something good might be up with his puppy Zoe.
He works from home, and last week, it was a little too quiet for him. He went to check on the one-year-old dog, and lo and behold, she had a PlayStation controller between her front paws and was gnawing on it.
Buttons were missing, controllers were ripped — Murphy said he blamed himself for putting the device out of Zoe’s reach, and went back to work.
“I go back to my desk and I start these email alerts popping up,” he said in an interview calgary eye opener.
“‘Thank you for your purchase. Thank you for your purchase.’ I thought, oh no. I was hacked.”
The correlation didn’t immediately sway Murphy.
He deleted the credit card and changed the password. He contacted PlayStation directly to find out what happened.
“They were like, ‘Yes, sir, this was ordered from your console.’ They confirmed the serial number, and I thought, ‘That’s not possible. It’s just me and my dog here.'”
He went downstairs and turned on the game console.Sure enough, ironically, in a section called watch dogs.
Listen | David Murphy explains how his dog racked up charges on his PlayStation account:
So far, he’s only seen two charges of $8 each — for in-game clothing add-ons — but he’s determined to find out.
That’s when everything… clicks.
“I guess while she was nibbling on buttons, she started buying and buying,” he said.
“Everything is automatic for me, right? If you hit the X button multiple times, you go straight to the store and you can order stuff.”
Given this odd situation, Murphy said PlayStation agreed to refund the purchase price.
He said he would now try harder to stock the controller. He also added a complex password to his account in case Zoey went on another spending spree.
Murphy said this isn’t the first time Zoe has done something like this.
In another quiet moment in mid-October, he found her with half a Barbie doll in her mouth, a present from his 8-year-old daughter’s toy box.
After tweeting about the incident, Barbie actually responded.
“I tweeted a picture. I thought, RIP Barbie. Then Barbie wrote back and said, ‘The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’ In fact, they sent my daughter a bunch of replacements, They were so nice.”
Rumors of my death have been exaggerated 😉 We wanted to give away some non-chew toys to refill the toy box.send us a private message
——@Barbie
course? Make sure things are stored properly, says Murphy. Otherwise the consequences could be costly.
“She has more strengths than weaknesses, and … we’ll train her out of that. But it’s good for a good laugh.”