I’ve had some weirdness at work recently. I keep a steno pad by the telephone I hung on my workspace wall. Just about an inch slides behind the phone to keep it in place & out of the way. A couple weeks ago I found a dab of chocolate on the edge of my pad and was like, “When was I eating chocolate?” Whatever; I figured I must have done it. A few days and a few pages later I notice the chocolate spot getting bigger. Not wider, but deeper, growing into the pad. Again I wondered, “What kind of greasy bonbon was I eating?” Again, nothing came to mind. Then yesterday, with the damn chocolate smudge even bigger and soaked into every page of the left side of the pad, I got so annoyed I had to trash it. The last thing I did at work was grab a new pad, open it to the first blank page and put it beside my phone.
Jump to this morning. I’m logging into voicemail, ready to start my day, and grab the spankin’ new steno pad from behind my phone; but I have to hang up because there’s melted chocolate on it. Now I'm pissed and thinking someone must have thought it would be funny to leave a Hershey bar, maybe a Kiss or something, behind my phone. Then I ponder on this scenario a little more and decided that anyone who would do that mustn't have both oars in the water so I shouldn’t get mad. I better just remove my idiot co-worker’s chocolate bar and get on with my day. I peer behind the phone, even pull it away from the wall, and guess what? I find nothing.
I got a little creeped out after that. I’m thinking, "If a douchetard co-worker is sneaking into my workspace while I'm gone to smudge chocolate on my yellow steno pad, what else is she/he doing to my stuff?" I’m checking my coffee cup for short n' curlys, scanning my phone receiver for lick marks and sniffing my Chap Stick for butt. (How I vaulted from dabbing chocolate on my papers to putting my Chap Stick in their pants I don’t know; but that’s how it went down.) Thank God I didn’t discover any of that. But if it’s not a deviant colleague, and it’s not me, what’s going on? I'm seriously stumped, so I put the pad back by the phone to see if I have a magical chocolate squirting telephone that only squirts chocolate when you put a steno pad behind it. Guess what? It did. I’m like WTF!!! and ripped the phone off the wall.
Only then did I find that the bottom, right, rubber foot had melted into a chocolate colored blob that was still contained in the footing. To be honest, I first thought, “Who the hell filled this tiny hole on the back of my phone with melted chocolate!?” but realized (probably not soon enough), after trying to pull the gob from the phone, that neither chocolate, nor a co-worker, was the culprit. It turned out to be less weird than what I originally thought but, still, why the heck would one rubber foot start melting off the back of my phone? And where am I going to put my steno pad now? And do any of our vending machines have Toblerone?
I heard a funny news story on the way in to work today. Apparently, a deadly fungus, called Cryptococcus gattii, has recently been found in Oregon. It’s killed a few dogs, cows, cats, sheep, elk, alpaca and people. This particular strain, officially known as VGIIc of the fungus Cryptococcus gattii, gets into people after they inhale its spores. Once that happens, 1 out of 4 doesn’t survive the attack. This would be otherwise healthy folk who just happened to be in Oregon; breathing. Oh, the funny part is that they have no idea how it got there! It’s actually a tropical fungus and the CDC can’t figure out how it’s surviving in such a temperate climate. The wonders of nature, huh?
