I was at work, minding my own business, which you know is never really true, but I was at least mostly minding my own business when I heard a shriek in the other room.
In our office's open floor plan, there is a wall of sorts separating some of us, but it has three doorways you can go through, and those don't even have doors in them--four. Four doorways. Ah, ah, ah... I was just The Count.
The Count, throwing up his gang sign or whatever.
Anyway, so despite the wall, it's really just a big open room, like we're a PBS pledge drive. Call us! {ring!} And get the box set of Downton Abby, The Heroin Years, absolutely free!
Anyway I got up to see the source of the screech. There were actually people who didn't, which always amazes me.
"THERE'S A SNAKE IN HERE!" one of the women flapped.
"A SNAKE?" I was appalled. We're on the "garden level," which is a euphemism for exactly on the ground level near a greenway, and we have had snakes before, and one very disturbed spider that freaked us all out.
"It's not a snake, it's a mouse," my boss said, lying on the ground to look at the poor thing, under a desk. "I saw something move very fast under this desk. It's a mouse."
More women shrieked. One huge art guy got up on a chair, like he was in the cartoons.
"Oh, where is it. Come here, honey," I said. How can you be scared of a bitsy gray mousie, who just wants to be friends and sit on a spool of thread and join you for tea? "I'll kiss him on his mouse head," I said.
Two women got up and moved to a different floor immediately. "IM me when it's over," one of them said. One guy, who's from New York and sort of metro,
said, "We should get a humane trap."
A humane trap.
"We aren't running a charity ward here," I told him. "What're we gonna do, capture and rehabilitate him? If you want him gone, we bring my cat here. Fourteen seconds later, that mouse is toast."
I like how I went from kissing him on the head to finding creative ways to off him, once the My-Cat's-a-Murderer pride took over.
"I'm allergic to cats," Kevin said. Kevin is the guy who held a football in my senior photos, who you all Mrs. Robinsoned over. As per usual.
"You're not allergic to cats," frowned my coworker Griff. "Cat allergies are bullshit. They're like secondhand smoke. People used to have to ride on planes with smokers. Now they smell smoke on someone's clothes, they get cancer."
Really, my workplace is full of fascinating people.
The point is, someone called HR, finally, which I guess took us awhile to do because pioneers. Pioneers of the Garden Level.
In the meantime, I named him Condoleeza Mice.
The mouse, not Griff.
