Critter

People have commented on their theories as to why there are never any crumbs or food that gets dropped on the floor in here. I mean its dark, people are always eating, and you never, ever, see anyone come by and sweep. You’d imagine that there’d be crap everywhere.

I normally get my food from the chow hall and bring it over to my desk so that I can watch TV, surf the net, whatever rather than sit either by myself or with people I hardly know in the dining facilities. A strange taste that I have is that I put ketchup on virtually anything I eat—in this case, the omelet that I get every morning (they were so good 3 months ago….not so much now). Well, I wandered back from the hall and opened my food box to discover, lo and behold, that I had forgotten my precious ketchup. Not to worry! I’ve done this before so I keep a stash of them in my desk drawer where I used to sit. So I saunter over, throw open the drawer, and start digging for my ketchup packets.

About 5 seconds later I see what I thought was a gag mouse that someone stuffed in there. Before I know it, said gag mouse sprints up my sleeve to get out of the way. He makes it all the way up to the patch on my shoulder before he realizes (and I agreed with him) that this wasn’t the approved method of escape. So he pulls a 180 and sprints back down my arm. Of course, by this point my cat-like reflexes have kicked in and I start flailing, and the mouse parajumps back into the drawer and hauls out of sight. If anyone ever wanted to hear a grown man--air force Major, jet pilot with over 3000 hours in flight--scream like a little girl, this was their opportunity. I also didn’t know I could move that fast, because I was 15 feet away before I knew what had actually happened.

Needless to say, I had cocktail sauce on my omelet this morning.