Working Around His Friends

Today at my apartment building, we had a community meeting.  A number of tenants had been arguing about various things, they had been a lot of rumors going around, a lot of complaints, etc., and I had suggested a meeting to the property manager and to my surprise, he took my suggestion.  I considered leaving Isaac in my apartment instead of taking him to the meeting, because I thought he would have a hard time behaving well with a lot of our neighbors there.  Isaac is not used to being in work mode around our neighbors, most of whom he considers good friends.  A few weeks ago, we had a rummage sale, and at that time I learned that many of my neighbors were not good at remembering not to pet Isaac when he is wearing his service dog vest, either.  Of course, they don't see him in his vest very often.  So I figured it would be difficult for both Isaac and our neighbors to behave during this meeting.

But I decided to take him anyway.  I thought it would be a good training opportunity and I could always just take him back upstairs if he wasn't behaving.

Well, he did fantastic!  So did most of our  neighbors.  Of course, a couple of them had gotten a talking to after the rummage sale.  Isaac did stand up and whimper a bit when a couple of his favorite people came in, but when I told him to lie down, he did.  At the end of the meeting, I took off his vest and let him socialize with everyone, which he really enjoyed.

It was particularly challenging for Isaac, I think, because some people came in to the meeting after it had already started, and so there was no time to let him say hello.  Normally what I do if he is going to have to be working around someone he likes a lot, like if Mike and I go out to lunch or something, is I give Isaac a chance to say hello outside before we enter the restaurant.  Then he is able to ignore Mike and do his job when we're inside.  But in this instance, people were coming in after the meeting had already started so I couldn't do that in this case.

I love it when he does such a great job.