I also agree that rats are a very good option, as long as you get at least 2 of them, you cannot have only 1 as they are very social animals. I already mentioned how incredibly intelligent they are, and they love to be held, cuddled, and can be taught tricks. If their litter box is cleaned daily there will be no smell, it's only scooping it out and adding litter daily, not a big deal. I would do some research on them before you just say "um, no" like you did.
I'm going to try to approach this differently than I have, though I fear you're going to just get a parrot anyway, and most likely something completely inappropriate like the macaws you were talking about, but I do give you credit for asking questions before just buying a bird. But as already mentioned by someone else you keep fully admitting that you cannot care properly for a parrot, then you go to the pet store and let a bird dealer tell you a cockatiel will be fine for you, which is completely wrong. Of course the person wanting to sell you the bird is going to tell you that it will be fine, he wants to sell you a bird! The advantage to asking members of this forum is that we are experienced and knowledgeable, we don't know you personally so we can take in the info you give us about your situation and tell you how we honestly feel, and we have nothing to gain either way.
I totally understand why you would want a pet that will interact with you and form a bond with you, and when you said what you said about your turtles ignoring you and only wanting food I then completely understood where you were coming from. But I also understood where you were coming from when you said that you had finished a project building the case for your computer or whatever it was, that it took a year and a half, and now you need something else to fill the few hours a week you have free, so you want a cuddly little bird that will bond with you and entertain you, and in your words "keep you busy". If I'm being honest with you, after I read that I got really, very upset. A parrot is not only a living creature, it's a living creature that has the intelligence and emotional needs of a young human child. It's clear that your knowledge of domestic parrots is limited, so I'm cutting you a break because I don't think that you had any idea what adding a bird to your life would involve, I think that you were under the impression that if you got a parrot you could leave it alone like you do your turtles, but that you would have the best of both worlds in that a parrot would just be happy whenever you decided to spend an hour or so with it, and that it would be affectionate and loving to you whenever you wanted it to be, but would be fine alone for 22 hours a day, and if it was an entire day, a few days, a week or more that you had to be away, then the parrot would be fine just like your turtles. You could just build an automated feeder for their food and water or have your "building manager" come in once a day and feed him while you were away for a week. Forgetting that this is entirely wrong regarding the parrot (in fact in the U.S. what you are talking about doing can be considered animal abuse due to neglect), I really don't think you're taking proper care of your turtles. But as already said, that's a topic for another forum.
The bottom line to your entire situation is that your current work schedule and lifestyle makes it impossible for you to not only own any type of parrot (finches/canaries aside) and provide the bare minimal care it requires to keep it alive, but you will not achieve what it is you want to begin with. I say this because what you desire is a pet that will bond with you, be affectionate with you, and that will love you and be excited to see you, but if you actually were to go out and buy a hand-raised, already tame baby parrot or adult parrot that was tame, after a few weeks of living locked inside a room alone for days, weeks at a time with basically no interaction with you or anyone else, and most likely a lack of proper sleep because you don't get home until after 10 at night, that tame bird you bought will most definitely turn into a timid, scared, unsocialized parrot that is afraid of physical contact, and most importantly to me, it will have developed psychological issues that cause it to self-harm. The number one reason parrots pluck themselves and self-mutilate is because of exactly what you are talking about doing. Someone that has the money to buy a parrot but not nearly the time to keep one goes out and buys one and proceeds to spend little to no time with it, disrupts it sleep (when exactly are the 2 hours you say you have per day for a bird if you work from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.?), and in a very short amount of time the bird starts to pluck and self-mutilate, then it starts to run away from the owner, and all people, then it starts biting people, then it becomes very aggressive, then it is rehomed. So you would be eliminating exactly what you seek by getting a parrot and not providing what it needs.
As someone else already wisely said, "The problem is that you want an affectionate, cuddly, loving pet, but the entire reason birds are like this is because they spend most all of their their lives and time with the person that they love. It's not unconditional I'm afraid.
With birds you get what you give.
"Dance like nobody's watching..."
stoped me form becoming a torturer.
. am almost 30 you know . not a kid . sad really sad.
