All the best people in the world love cats. But even the most fervent cat lover admits that they are, as a rule, useless. A cat with a clear job in life is a rare and wonderful thing. Hence our collective love of the bodega cat, whose lives are documented for us by the kind people at WNYC today.

The videos are narrated in the first person (of the cat) by their respective bodega owners. Your mileage may vary, but I am personally most fond of Carmel, above, because she lives in Queens and because she is a kitten. Also because she seems significantly less lazy than your average lounging bodega cat, whose method of warding off rats is primarily sleep-based.

I mean, look at Oliver, whose activities seem centered around eliciting admiration in passers-by:

His owner has a delightful Upper West Side twang though, doesn't she.

Sheeba, of Park Slope, is also wonderfully scratchy-sounding in the manner of a gave-up-on-the-acting-thing-early Joey Tribbiani:

Those of you eager to continue to think about the taxonomy and typology of city cats on this 8th day of August, 2014, should read Gay Talese's classic 1957 piece "Journey Into the Cat Jungle." Things have changed very little, though apparently there once were part-timer bodega cats. A sample:

The part-time grocery-store or restaurant cat, often a reformed Bohemian, eats well and keeps rodents away, but it prefers to spend the nights prowling the streets. One grocer says his part-time cat comes and goes, using the store like a hotel. Despite the liberal working hours, such cats still assume most of the privileges of a related breed — the full-time, or wholly non-stray, grocery store cat — including the right to sleep in the window. A reformed Bohemian at a Bleecker Street delicatessen some years ago used to hide behind the door and chase away all other Bohemians looking for handouts.

It is a classic of Cat Journalism.