spring cleaning comes early this year

maybe it's not in the holiday spirit to amuse yourself (and hopefully your loyal blog readership) at someone else's expense... but so it goes.

it's not clear to me why we haven't already told you about this - perhaps because it has smoldered along for so many years it just hasn't occurred to us. but in light of the newest chapter, here we go. please bear with the back-story:

my blogmate and i share our office and its three computers with 5 other people. needless to say, the social benefits of working in such close quarters are thwarted by the impossibility of getting anything done. the sad thing is, we actually have another office that was left in a state of abandon and neglect until a few weeks ago when my blogmate, bikemyers, and i decided to take it back.

for years nobody has wanted to work there because it resides next to the facility that breeds lab mice for the entire medical center. mice breading, as it turns out, is an unbearably smelly business. but the mouse factory will soon move to another location and as operations wind down the horrible smell from across the hall is less and less of an issue.

the problem, however, is that we have a squatter. meet the mystery enshrouded e., a german woman famous for her astonishingly pungent body odor, who, despite having comleted her training her almost 4 years ago continues to roam the dark halls of our department working on some kind of "research." we don't think she's on the payroll, and we're pretty sure she doesn't have a functioning ID. but there she is, every afternoon, acting so creepy that none of us want to go anywhere near the office. she's so creepy, in fact, that we can't seem to get anyone up the hierarchical ladder to help us evict her. even when she used to articulate coherent thoughts she was always such a mumbler that no one could really understand her, and back then we were always distracted by the b.o. and the concern that she actually lived in the hospital. in spite of some reassuring signs that she does, in fact, have an apartment with a working shower, the creepy factor is rising - one of our colleagues found her in the ladies room, in the dark, huddled in the dark. another found her in the elevator, rocking back and forth, muttering to herself.

as we began thinking of ways to take back the office the feeding back we got from the higher ups was less than encouraging. something like, "don't do it. you'll be sorry you ever got involved." perhaps we should have heeded the warning, but instead it only fueled our indignance. you might think it's tragic and sad that we have such an obviously unstable lost soul amongst us, but it's not like people haven't tried to help her. and besides, can't she be crazy in someone else's office?

we went straight for the jugular. we marched into the office shoved her coat and bag off into a corner (even more mysterious than what she does in our office is what she's doing when she's somewhere else in the building), and promptly dumped the entire contents of the office into the dumbster we stole from down the hall. judging from 1999 doc films poster on the wall no one had done any major office purging for a long time, and there was dust enough to prove it. after the purge and wipe down we proudly marged out of the office, leaving mounds of trash outside the door, and didn't say a word the the bewildered e. when we passed her in the hall. we weren't there to see her reaction - if you're teetering on the brink of insanity it can't help any to come back from a coffee break to find your workspace entirely gutted. but again, so it goes.

we're hoping the great office purge of 2007 will send the right signal - said signal reading something like, "don't let the door hit you on your way out." but we won't go down without a fight. our boss may not care that we have a maladjusted, stinky squatter in our office, but we're pretty sure campus security will.

bah humbug.