Backroads Barking Torture

My dogs work the night shift. Eleven to seven. They lace up their steel-toed boots, don hardhats, pack their black metal lunchboxes with baloney-and-mustard on Wonder Bread, fill their thermoses with coffee...and punch the time clock. It is my goal to see them fired.

I have not seen their contracts. But I suspect they were hired to bark intermittently at the wind in the trees, distant canine cousins three counties over, and absolutely nothing. Each of my three mutts deserves a plaque for Employee of the Month. A parking spot near the entrance. A key to the executive washroom.

There is no point in flinging open the door and chastising my blue-collared workers. No. Even a simple shout of "Bad Dog!" results in them rushing me in an orgy of whining, licking, sidling, and tail-whipping, the imminent apocalypse to which they alerted me gone on a zephyr.

I refuse to have my workers' barkers removed. On the off chance that some ne'er-do-well might hear my hillbilly hounds, and imagine the gnashing, bone-crushing jaws of invisible pit bulls. Or fleet dobermans, aching to relentlessly, doggedly, pursue the perpetrators of mayhem upon my property.

The horns of my dilemma are honed to razor-sharp points, my friends. I'm losing sleep over this quandary.