It was Labor Day’s weekend and, after almost begging for the day of vacation I legally deserved, I managed to leave for a 4-days trip to the mountains of New Hampshire, where I could practice my poor climbing skills as much as I wanted, free of the shameful self-awareness I normally have when climbing at the gym (where everybody looks at me as if I was a lost cheerleader that accidentally found herself in the wrongest of the wrong places).
Back to work on the next Tuesday, I noticed a weird smell coming from the back of the office.
Now, I have to step back and describe this office or, better, what I like to call ‘office’, completely ignoring the fact that a phone and a desk are really not sufficient elements to qualify this ‘room’ with such a sophisticated word as ‘office’. The ‘room’ is located below a store, store owned by the same company I work for, right next to what we kindly refer to as our ‘showroom’ (another big word we like to use inappropriately). So, yes, the so called office is in a basement. This should be enough already to make me drop whatever I’m doing and write a effective-as-of-yesterday resignation letter.
The back of the office, the place where the smell was coming from, is a space right behind my desk, next to a door that leads to the general maze-looking building basement. If you open that door (not that you really want to do that unless you’re a masochist), what you see is not a dumpster or a washing machine, or whatever normally sits in a basement: what you would see here is a pinball machine: a pure back-from-the-90’s perfectly functioning pinball machine, that the building super and his toothless loyal assistant like to play for few hours a day, when they need some deserved relief from overwhelming tasks such as in ‘change a light bulb’, ‘call the window cleaners to remind them to clean’, or whatever the hell they do all day, whether it is sleeping or playing cards. I discovered the existence of this machine by accident, after hearing a loud ‘beep’ followed by ‘oh yeah baby!!’ – at first I thought it was the fire alarm going off, but then I doubted anybody in the building would be that happy about it being destroyed by flames (with the exception of me, but obviously I wasn’t the one cheering out loud). I opened the door and there I found the two of them, with sweat pouring down their foreheads, after reaching the ‘Master Level’ of a game called “Dwarfs vs Aliens: the Ultimate Fight’ or something like that. “Hey there!! Waaassuuup! Wanna play?” – that’s how I was greeted, and when they saw the disappointment on my face (not for the machine, but for the lack of flames around), they added “Oh come on! It’s free!”. Oooh! Duh! If it’s free, THEN I will play! – that’s what I felt like replying, but instead I told them I had to take care of some annoying business there – aka work – and backed off.
Back to smelly day – later on I found out that the super himself noticed a pretty strong ‘scent’ coming out of the same spot, but for reason unknown to my mortal brain, he didn’t bother to tell me anything until after I urged him into the office, disgusted and nauseous from my morning discovery (no, I was not pregnant). I guessed he was involved in a very challenging pinball competition with Sir OneTooth at that time and couldn’t afford to get distracted.
So, that Tuesday, when I noticed that smell, I thought it was some leftover ‘gift’ from the previous week toilet flooding, that made everything in the ‘back-office’ float 2 inches from the ground in what at first seemed to be sewage water. A closer look at it confirmed the initial suspect.
On Wednesday I went back to work, against my will, who kept whispering tempting commercial slogans such as “JetBlue end of summer deals! Pack that bathing suit, even if it doesn’t fit you anymore because you eat like a grown-up man, and GO!”. I should have listened to my smart-self, that definitely knows better, or it’d be called stupid-self, no? A step into the room and my nostrils were filled with a mix of acid, rancid and “Oh-God-somebody-has-been-murdered-here-and-I-can-still-smell-the-fear” type of odours.
Since I work alone, I couldn’t count on a slave-assistant to do the job and so I went to check the source of this special, one of a kind scent: and as I peaked my head next to the basement door, I saw it. A pretty small mouse caught in a trap the exterminator placed few days before. In normal circumstances, especially ones with at least one man around me, I would just squeak like a real girl and let him take care of business. But in this case I figured that either I did it, or I’d die out of intoxication. Brave and kind of proud of my own little courage, I put my hand inside a plastic bag (like those polite dog-owners do every morning) and leaned over to pick up the trap with the dead mouse in it. As I lifted though, I felt some sticky resistance and when I eventually pulled it up a ten times stronger smell and a zillion times more revolting image presented to me: larvae. Tons of them. Crawling. No, worse, actually. Crawling on top of each other in the ultimate desperate attempt to grab the last bit of their party damn favor. THEN, I squeaked, dropped the trap and ran to call the exterminator, eventually being able to make an emergency appointment with him, after promising him that my boss would please him and his friends in every dirty little way.
After that I left the room to open the store above, accompanied for the whole day by something sitting right under my nose, something that smelled like the perfume a pirate’s body must have after being resumed from his 200 years under-water vacation. Needless to say, my dreams that night involved skulls, gigantic worms and a creepy toothless mouse playing with Captain Hook at a pinball machine.
