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:
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 530