My night of terror

Last night I went to bed at about 10:30, thinking how nice it would be to go to sleep at a respectable time and wake up the next morning knowing that Barack Obama was now officially the President of the US. I would snuggle up under the sheet with Emily (a bear) and Panda (a panda) and the new episode of Uhh Yeah Dude and fall asleep knowing that the world would be a better place in the morning.

Instead, it ended up being one of the scariest nights of my life.

For some reason I didn't get to sleep straight away and by the end of the podcast was still awake enough to register that it was over and it was time to start up another one. I selected something and pressed play, and reached for the glass on my bedside table to have a drink before going back to sleep. I gulped down two mouthfuls and, as I started on the third, I saw by the light of my ipod screen just about the most terrifying and disgusting thing you could imagine: a cockroach crawling up the side of the glass.

Horrified I threw the glass back on the table and ran across the room to turn on my light rather than touch the lamp that shared the table with the glass and its new inhabitant. I returned to my bed and just stared at the now empty glass, my mouth growing drier and more bitter as I thought about all the baits I had left around the house and backyard and how drugged up and poison-filled that cockroach must have been. I was paralysed with fear and disgust, looking around the corner between the table and my wardrobe and wondering where the monster had gone. Finally, I noticed it, sitting calmly under the wardrobe. I grabbed a shoe, and turned back around to face my oppressor only to find it had disappeared.

Creeped out but with far more pressing concerns on my mind, I went out to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and scraped my tongue and gargled water for about ten minutes. I was thirsty again but there were no glasses left in the freezer, where we store clean ones, and every innocent looking glass, either on the table or in the cupboard, suddenly looked like a giant pile of cockroach shit in my imagination. I went back to my room to try to find the cockroach again, with the hope of eventually murdering it and being able to get back to sleep. I found it straight away, climbing the floor rack of the budgie's cage, which I had taken out of said cage and stored behind the wardrobe. Conveniently, the vaccum cleaner was right there in my room so I grabbed it, pulled off the head, turned it on and aimed.

But alas, the cockroach was too quick. It ran along the rack and out of my reach, then out from under the wardrobe and along the wall under my bed, right under where my head would usually rest.

I thought it would be too narrow a space between the mattress and the bed head, or the bed head and the wall, to get in with a shoe, or certainly to use my other cockroach killing weapon of choice, the box my laptop came in (heavy, wide, and with handle!) so I grabbed a drumstick and tried to poke it, but it was too quick. It started running up the wall and I saw my chance and grabbed a shoe, ready to pounce when it got up to where the bed head ended and unobstructed wall began. It must have noticed me though, because it changed direction and ran under the bed again.

Fed up and oh so tired, I pulled up one of the bed slats so there was room, and thumped the shoe down on the cockroach. I squished and wiped and rubbed furiously to make sure there was no way it could escape. I retracted the shoe and threw it across the room, along with half the cockroach's body which was now goo on the sole.

The other half of the cockroach, however, was relatively undamaged, just a bit marred from having been dragged along the carpet along with the portion that was under the shoe. This "half" that remained under the bed was noticeabley without head; just three legs, a wing and a bit of body. Predictably, the legs were still moving as I know they are prone to do. In a rare logical moment, I told myself that this was just the last reflexes and it would all be over soon and I could go back to sleep. To put my mind at rest I thought I would stick something heavy over the top of the half cockroach while it went through its death throes, so went to eh other side of the room and eventually selected a 2/3 full bottle of jaegermeister, the heaviest, solidest thing in my room. I picked it up and took it back over to where the cockroach was.

Or should I say, where the cockroach HAD BEEN.

It was gone. Completely and totally gone, with not a trace of anything.

I was SHITTING MYSELF.

The prospect of a cockroach sharing my water was scary. The thought that pretty much every night I had potentially had a cockroach that close or closer to my head was even scarier. And I knew beyond all doubt that, knowing there was a cockroach in my room there was NO way I would get to sleep. Even with no evidence of roaches I fear them at night - the budgie's scurrying becomes the scurrying of a cockroach; a lock of hair falling on my face becomes the scurry of one of the disgusting creatures.

But let me tell you, none of that compared, not even a bit, to this new prospect of ALMOST HALF A COCKROACH DRAGGING ITSELF AROUND UNDER MY BED.

So, I did not sleep a whole lot last night, but by a quarter to two I had managed to drift off and thus missed the inauguration by a matter of minutes.

Oh, and while I was fighting the big mean cockroach, my budgie (appropriately, for today, named Barack), who had earlier in the evening bitten me in the eye, decided that 1 in the morning while I'm trying to protect the two of us from an arthropodic zombie would be an excellent time to make amends for what he had done, and every time I walked past his cage (which is situated at my bedroom doorway) he would adorably jump down and wait at the door to be let out, then jump up to my neck and snuggle (which is something he NEVER does, especially not when he has a treat in his cage and especially not when I've yelled at him for biting me on the eyeball). So in between all the killing and being terrified there were a few moments of snuggling with Barack which just made the whole thing way more bizarre.

Then this morning I went to Hungry Jacks to get a much-needed coffee and a cheesy omelette wrap for breakfast, and ended up having my new years resolution of cutting out beef (which I have actually been doing since well before January) broken for me when I was mistakenly given a steak and egg wrap instead. Once I realised what it was I was a bit relieved though, because it was much better than what I had first thought: a very old, tough, brown, salty omelette. The manager apologised profusely and brought me over a new wrap but all day I have been unable to get the taste of steak, and the percieved taste of poisoned cockroach, out of my mouth.

Oh yeah, and I'm seeing grey splotches out of my one good eye due to the whole being bit on the eye thing.

It has not been a great day for my face.

Stuff we know about the new Amy Poehler sitcom

For months there has been no word on the new untitled Amy Poehler vehicle/non-Office spin off, but recently a few new details have come to light. Hooray!

We now know that it is a sitcom in the mockumentary-ish style of The Office, with Poehler starring as a mid-level beauraucrat in the parks and reserves department of an Indiana town. So I'm guessing we can expect more of the same Michael Scott-esque hijinks and talking heads and shaky zoom-ins on furtive looks, but with a slightly different backdrop and the added awesomeness of Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari? How could it fail?! I for one am definitely counting down the days until April 6th.

Aziz Ansari himself has spilled some of the beans in his blog, which is well worth checking out.

More details surely to come!

Limitless Paper in a Paperless World

Sometimes the stupidity of the human race, and particularly that of my coworkers, astounds me.

As you may or may not know, I work for a subsidiary of News Ltd which produces and distributes free local newspapers in Perth and its surrounds. I'm in the "distributes" part which means it's my job to see that, once the articles have been written and the ad space sold, the paper (not all of them, just the 5 northern suburbs ones) gets out to as many people as our sales reps told their clients it would. Just before I started, they launched a website which brings together articles from the various papers and other little bits of interest - blogs, videos, games, etc.

Launched just after I arrived was a national initiative in which the staff of News Ltd's local newspaper companies around the countries can go to a website and submit and discuss their ideas to improve the company - basically a national suggestion box in which nothing is anonymous. When I have a spare moment, I often check up to see if there has been any developments here, because they are usually amusing, sometimes breathtakingly immoral and horrifying, and very occasionally good. For example, there's this one guy who submits all these ideas like, "someone should monitor how much stationery the staff are using to cut down on costs" and "we should cut down on after work drinks because it's costing too much". FFS, dude, I think Rupert Murdoch's not going to notice a couple of extra Coronas of a Friday. Then there was this girl who put one up suggesting that we go into schools and give seminars, under the guise of teaching kids about money-management and work ethic, and encourage them to sign up to do paper rounds with us. I think if the management had actually taken on that idea I would have had to either quit immediately or drown in a pool of self hatred.

So anyway, the site was a little quiet over the Christmas break, and I ended up giving up and hadn't checked it at all this year. So I logged on this afternoon and found about 20 new ideas up there. A few of them were by a woman in my office who I very much like and who, so far, has produced ALL the ideas that have not caused me to either laugh riotously or feel sick in the stomach. One was from a guy in one of the other offices whom I suspect will be shunned in the toilet blocks from now on, as he suggested the company switch to WATER FREE URINALS. A few were so incomprehensible that I wondered why literacy was not a requirement for getting a job at a NEWSPAPER.

While I was perusing a site I got an email from one of the company's main managers, informing all staff that they had booked a company called "Green Advantage" to assess our offices and tell us ways in which we can be less harmful to the environment (incidentally the money situation's not so dire then?) I LOLed, and then continued reading my coworkers' suggestions. And came to one that floored me.

It was about how we should not print emails, and handle everything possible through email memos rather than internal mail, and that we should encourage clients to send us things through email rather than by fax. And the heading of this humble suggestion?

"A PAPERLESS OFFICE".

Right. A paperless office in which we, um, produce... newspapers. Yep, I'm sure turning a couple of lights off and not printing out that funny forward Joe in editorial sent out will definitely offset the TONNES AND TONNES OF PAPER we are producing every week to distribute unsolicited.

Fuuuuuuck.

Linda, whose ideas I always like, by the way, had a similar suggestion, but hers was a little more far reaching. She suggested that we phase out the newspaper in favour of putting more energy into the website. Which is absolutely the only way we are ever going to be environmentally friendly as a company.

Really, to give any more than a token glance to the idea of environmental conservation we would by definition have to cease to exist as a company.Not that the people instigating these short-term measures care of course. A token glance is all they care to give.

Every day, I feel more and more like I work at Dunder Mifflin.