Monday, November 14, 2005

Sometimes I am SUCH a girl

This morning, I was sitting at my desk trying to look busy when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. I turned my head and squealed at the sight of a GIGANTIC cockroach, flipped over onto it's back and writhing around.

Now, gigantic cockroaches are not unusual around here, but this one was less than two feet from my desk, which means that it was less than two feet from ME, which is completely unacceptable.

So there it was, wriggling it's shiny gross legs and long icky antennae and trying to get itself flipped back over so it can go back along it's shiny gross cockroach way. And there I was, frozen in my chair and completely unable to do anything. We had reached an impasse.

I'm wearing fairly heavy platform boots today, so I could have stepped on him, but then I would have gotten cockroach goo all over my cute boots. And I could have kicked him away, but then he might have flipped over and run away.

Then I realized that I had to pee. I couldn't walk over him to get to the bathroom because he might have hopped up, latched onto my leg and gotten cockroach cooties on me or crawled up to my head and gotten into my brain or something.

So I sat at my desk, doing the pee dance in my chair and waiting for someone to come and save me.
.
.
.
.
and waiting.
.
.
.
.
.
and waiting. (What the hell? When I'm trying to blog or send out emails, my office is like Grand Central Station, but when I really, really need someone, it's a ghost town.)

Finally after about 10 minutes (which, factoring in my heavy bladder, felt like about 10 hours) the rude project manager guy wandered downstairs.

"Can you please do me a favor?" I whined, knowing that, because this is the South, he can't refuse - guys here may not have any respect for women, but they'll pretty much do anything we ask them to.

So he removed the awful beast and flushed it and it appeared that some bladder relief was in sight for me.

But then he decided to get back at me for inconveniencing him by locking himself in my bathroom and spending half an hour making such a racket in there that I don't know if I'll ever be able to go in there again.

I don't get how I can pick up any lizard or snake, but I can't even move a half-dead cockroach away from my desk and out of my line of sight.

I also don't get how flipped-over cockroaches just appear out of nowhere. It's fucking creepy.