The Great Roach Kidnapping Caper — Part I

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…