At approximately 10:30 this morning, the women's bathroom on the first floor of our office filled up with smoke. Nasty, acrid clouds filled the stalls and blurred the mirror, but nobody could find the source. Ms. Faye called the fire department and we all hung out in the parking lot waiting for the truck.
How's that for symbolism? It's my last day at work and the building is going to burn down.
We heard the sirens coming down Cesar Chavez, and not one but *two* fire trucks pulled up to the building. Guess not much was going on in East Austin this morning. The firefighters checked out the bathroom, but by this time most of the smoke had cleared out. It was just a blown circuit. Blame it on the shoddy 1970's wiring running through the bat-infested attic.
Yes, that's right, *bat* infested. Last week as I was walking down the hall to my office, I came face-to-face with a Mexican fruit bat that was hanging on the ceiling, wings all splayed out, beady little bat eyes staring back at me. I screamed, dropped my coffee, and nearly tumbled down the stairs. Mr. Roy, one of our senior volunteers and a no-nonsense kind of a guy, trapped the bat in a box and took it out by the dumpster. Turns out it was the third one inside the building that week. Someone from the City came by to collect the critter and test it for rabies, and took a look in our crawlspace to see if any more were roosting up there. There were. Ah, the perils of living in Austin, home to the largest urban bat colony in the world.
It's 4:22pm now and I'm getting ready to take down my prevention posters and load up the car. Goodbye, bats. Goodbye working in the barrio. Goodbye underpaid, overworked position.* It's been quite the experience.
*just for the record, I am getting ready to start an even more underpaid, overworked job next month. damn humanitarian, do-good-for-my-community, nonprofit world!!!
1 comment:
i hear ya! good post, those damn bats but all up in my biz too! well maybe not.
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