The Play­ers: (in order of appear­ance)
Rob — Indus­trial Engi­neer
Pene­lope — Dead Roach
Win­nie — Clean­ing Lady
Danny — Head Clean­ing Crew Guy
Ian, Chip, David, Greg, Bob — Cho­rus
Mark — Mus­cle
Brian — Brains

The Back Story: Rob’s office is just out­side the engi­neer­ing side of the front office’s entrance to the cafe­te­ria. Like most man­u­fac­tur­ing front offices, the folks aren’t in actual offices they are in cubi­cles. Our cubes are nice, fairly new, blue fab­ric, 60″ high acousti­cal pan­els. Nobody has the actual slick cubi­cle fur­ni­ture, but old 70’s desks with wood veneer over­lay tops that have been painted gray along with the wide vari­ety of mis­matched bookcases.

A cou­ple of weeks ago when Rob came into work he noticed a dead pal­metto bug lay­ing upside down on the top of the cubi­cal wall that is next to the cafe­te­ria door all the way up against the wall. He left it there, maybe out of fear of touch­ing it (it might just be play­ing dead), but most likely in a lit­tle game of let’s see how long it takes to get picked up by the clean­ing crew.

We have an out­side clean­ing crew that takes care of the build­ing. It con­sists of a lady, Win­nie, that emp­ties the cubi­cle trash cans and keeps the rest rooms clean. She is as nice as you can be, but often times you can see bits of trash lay­ing on the floor next to the just emp­tied cans. Either it because she is a lit­tle over­weight and has trou­ble reach­ing the floor or maybe she has some eye­sight issues and doesn’t notice the odd gum wrapper/used sticky note or just maybe she just can’t be both­ered to be that thor­ough with what they pay her.

The clean­ing crew super­vi­sor is there most days to check out how Win­nie is doing and maybe help out, but seems to spend most of his time sit­ting out­side in the break area smok­ing and talk­ing on his cell phone. Danny’s favorite trick is to play inspec­tor gen­eral by walk­ing around the front office, run­ning his fin­gers along the top of the cubi­cle walls like he has white gloves on and checks to see if the sec­ond shift crew has done the dusting.

Rob noticed this Inspec­tor Gen­eral behav­ior sev­eral times and the fact that the dead roach is still there after two weeks. Hav­ing grown found of the insect corpse he has now given it a name, Pene­lope, pro­nounced Pen — ah — lohp and has spent all of the week before last telling the story of Pen ah lohp to all his sur­round­ing engi­neer friends. This amuses Mark & Brian to no end.

The Plan: Kid­nap the Roach

…to be continued…

Go back and read Part I if you already haven’t, I’ll wait.

The Plan: Kid­nap the Roach. Rob’s day is spent mostly sit­ting in front of the com­puter and deal­ing with the engi­neers in sur­round­ing cubi­cles, so he is not often not out of sight from his beloved Pene­lope (Pen-ah-lohp). Mark and I decided that who­ever noticed Rob away from his desk they would scoop the roach up and tuck it away in my cube some­where. My “office” was cho­sen because of its prox­im­ity to Rob’s, this way we wouldn’t have to explain to any ran­dom co-worker we passed why we might be car­ry­ing around a slightly mum­mi­fied bug.

The Grab: On the after­noon of Fri­day before last, Mark passed by Rob’s cube and he wasn’t there. Because of our company’s flex time plan on Fri­days about half the front office staff works only half the day. I was one of them, Rob was work­ing that after­noon, but else­where, so it was a per­fect time to kid­nap the roach as there was a greatly reduced chance of any wit­nesses. The roach was placed in its hold­ing cell, a small translu­cent plas­tic box that a machine had come in, and placed unob­tru­sively on my desk.

The Ran­som: The fol­low­ing Mon­day morn­ing, using a cou­ple of fonts I found on the web, ran­som note & ran­som, I cre­ated a note to let Rob know that his dead bug had been snatched not just tossed away when the clean­ing crew finally decided to check his cubi­cal wall. I didn’t want to just put it in his com­pany mail slot, I didn’t know how often he checked it, Maybe I should fax it to him. Well how can I do that with­out giv­ing away where it came from? Then I remem­bered from awhile back when I needed a fax, that there was a web site that offered free fax­ing, faxZERO. I ran into a stum­bling block, they needed an valid email address to con­firm the send­ing of the fax. No prob­lem, I opened a Yahoo email account using my gmail account as a con­fir­ma­tion. So I made a PDF of the note and faxed it to our victim:

Go back and read Parts I and 2 if you already haven’t, I’ll wait.

Day 1 (cont.): Mark and I do not inter­act with Rob too often, so we couldn’t very well walk up and ask, “Hey. What’s new?” right after he got the fax with­out arous­ing sus­pi­cion. We laid low, wait­ing to hear through the grapevine of Rob’s reac­tion. We heard noth­ing. Maybe that free inter­net fax thing didn’t work.*

*We didn’t know until much later in the week that the fax had actu­ally got­ten through. And when he got it Rob went up to our “recep­tion­ist”, who also for­wards all the incom­ing faxes via email to the recip­i­ents, and asked who sent it, she couldn’t tell any more than he could from the ad sup­ported cover page. He did say to her that it had Brian writ­ten all over it. Unfor­tu­nately my rep­u­ta­tion pro­ceeds me as I have really earned my in house nick­name of Arts & Crafts Engineer.

Day 2: On Tues­day morn­ing I pre­pared a sec­ond ran­som note that we would slip in his mail­box or maybe to be sure, just stick it on his desk. Hav­ing watched enough Life­time TV movies I knew that any good kid­nap­per would have a pic­ture taken of the vic­tim with that day’s news­pa­per to show 1) they actu­ally had the vic­tim and 2) they were unharmed (although #2 didn’t really mat­ter in this case):

That after­noon when Mark walked by Rob in the hall, Rob was giv­ing him a look. Mark asked ever so inno­cently, “What’s hap­pen­ing?” Rob tilted his head and fol­lowed Mark’s path said, “I’ve got my eye on you.” Later I received the same treat­ment as I casu­ally passed by Rob’s cubi­cal. He obvi­ously sus­pects us, but can­not prove it…

Go back and read Parts I, 2 and 3 if you already haven’t, I’ll wait.

Day 3: I decide to lay it on thick today. The pic­ture with the news­pa­per isn’t good enough in this day and age, we need video! For­tu­nately my digi­cam, like most today, can take short movies. First I scour the web to find plans for an small origami chair. I found a cou­ple, but they seem overly com­plex, so I opt for an eas­ier one. A lit­tle den­tal floss and I head off to the same stu­dio with avail­able daily news­pa­per as yesterday:

I sent Rob the video as an attach­ment using the newly opened yahoo email account, the body of the mes­sage sim­ple stated, “Check your mail­box.” Inside his mail­box was note num­ber three, the instruc­tions for the ran­som drop:

Go back and read Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 if you already haven’t, I’ll wait.

Day 3: cont. A lit­tle before 3:00PM I wan­dered into the café­te­ria to refill my mug with ice from the machine. This in of itself is not unusual as I nor­mally do this around that same time most days, but had Rob actu­ally gone in there to drop off any ran­som he prob­a­bly of would have fig­ured he’d con­firmed my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the kid­nap­ping. He was no where to be seen and nei­ther were any Wal­mart bags.

Day 4: On Thurs­day morn­ing I made up one more ran­som note:

I didn’t take a pic­ture, so I had to recre­ate it with clip art, but Mark found me a dead cricket and I taped one of it legs to the piece of paper. Using the “roachrobbie83” yahoo mail address I sent a sec­ond check your mail­box note with the sub­ject line “Where’s The Ran­som?” Rob replied via email:

please don’t hurt her. Pene­lope F Chick­ene­tia is a very lov­ing crea­ture. they don’t have blue bags. we need more time. how to you expect a guy to come with with that kinda loot in such a short time.

I’ve got white bags with blue wal mart writ­ing. will that do?

Later that after­noon he accosted both Mark and I sep­a­rately with one bot­tle of RC Cola in a Wal­mart bag. We were stick­ing with our story of know­ing noth­ing about it, I even tried to toss the blame at one of his cubi­cal neigh­bors, but he wouldn’t believe us.

Day 5: On Fri­day I decided that enough was enough and if I had an oppor­tu­nity I would just return Rob’s dead roach back to his cubi­cal where his was last seen a week ago. About mid morn­ing I stood up to get a draw­ing out of the printer and noticed Rob walk­ing down the hall towards the other end of the plant, I made a quick u-turn and got the bug. No one saw me place it back and I’m not sure if he was mess­ing around or not, but when Mark walked by and pointed out that his bug was back he seemed sur­prised and overjoyed.

Later that after­noon Rob brought me the bot­tle in a bag say­ing he didn’t drink RC and that I had earned it. I replied, “I don’t really like RC either, but thanks.” and took the drink.

Day 8: On Mon­day morn­ing when the vend­ing machine guy came in to refill the drink machines I traded him the RC and a quar­ter for a 20oz bot­tle of Dr. Pep­per. Who says crime doesn’t pay?