Problems with Strays

I have a lot of problems with strays. I have a tendancy to want to pick up and help any stray animal that comes along. On the other hand my wife picks up stray people to help. She is a natural-born social worker and I've tried to get her to apply for a job with human services, so we could at least get some money out of this tendancy of hers, but she won't. I would help if my wife didn't pick the absolute bottom of the barrel, lost cause, take-em-out-to-the-woodshed-and-shoot-em, no hope cases to try to fix.

Case in point is the whiner. This is a lady she met on a former job. Put my wife in a room with 29 normal, well-adjusted people (is there such a creature?) and 1 psycho and guess who she'll make friends with. Anyway they started eating lunch together. Most of the time my wife bought lunch for them both as the woman never had any money. I don't know that she ever bought my wife lunch. She also had a habit of borrowing small amounts of money that I don't believe she ever paid back. Anyway this woman was divorced, surprise. She also had 2 children that her former husband had custody of. Now this is the Southern part of the US. We are conservative and non-progressive. It is still very rare for the man to get custody of the children in a divource if the wife is alive and unicarcerated. Anyway she whines and whines about how she never gets to see her kids and how they are getting so big and she is missing out on their lives and everything. This goes on for months at work and on line through IM, so my wife finally springs into action.

Using the knowledge she gained from listening to the whiner, my wife knew that the boy was on his elementary school basketball team and the girl was a cheerleader. My wife then did the following extremely complicated actions. 1. She called the elementary school where the kids were enrolled. (this required the use of a phone and phonebook). 2. She asked when the next home game was. 3. She wrote the information on a piece of paper. 4. She called and arranged to pick the woman up and take her to the game. (Note: none of this should have been beyond the capabilities of the Whiner to do on her own.)

Do you want to know what happened. When the day came to go to the game, the Whiner suddenly had to go to her mother's and could not make it to the game. I tried to explain to my wife that the woman didn't really want help or out of her situation, she just wanted people to feel sorry for her and let her skate along. I also tried to explain that if people won't help themselves, you can't help them. This was just one of several things she tried to do to help the woman, but for some reason the woman never followed through on anything. I know it hurt my soft-hearted wife a lot, which hurts me.

By the way, my home is currently being destroyed by this mother cat and her 8 extremely cute kittens I found playing in the road on my way home the other day, anyone need a pet?