Ever since my boss gave the okay to 60 hour work weeks (meaning 20 hours of potential overtime), a lot people have been staying in the office until at least 6pm. Some even stay until 10pm. Me? I’m not too concerned with overtime and I leave about an hour after wanting to gouge out my eyes from staring at a computer and manipulating spreadsheets for too long. Some days it’s after 9 hours and some days it’s after only 5. It’s like my own test of willpower. Can I make it that next hour without blurred vision? Will my sanity still be there? It’s like this crazy mind game I can play.. and the outcome is never the same twice in a row. Usually I will take some time and just set my forehead down on my desk and leave it there for about 5 minutes. Then I pick it up and I have only 55 minutes to go. Score 1 me.
Needless to say, after anyone spends 3 hours making spreadsheets, they start to go a little crazy. But when 5pm rolls around and a lot of people have been there for 10 hours already (except for me… since I usually stroll in at about 9am), people start talking gibberish and laughing at God knows what. Suddenly people are talking about weird crap and nobody can focus any more. They are losing their minds.
I think that I have mentioned here before that I learned how to survive bear attacks at work. And believe it or not, that conversation did not happen at the late hours of the evening, but at around 2pm. The guy that sits next to me just knows a lot about bears. ANYWAY. Last night, as the sun was setting and we were all still sitting around talking and clicking away on excel, the bear conversation came up again. Eventually it evolved into a conversation about cougars and how, if you were to ever encounter one, you had better just get the biggest stick you can and hope to God that you’re able to beat it away (and then I giggled because I was thinking about how that might apply to the older-women-type as well). And then it become a conversation about all cats, big or small. And FINALLY, about 15 minutes after the initial conversation began, the common house cat was introduced into the discussion.
Are you ready for this? Because this totally blew my mind when they told me this little factoid. Make sure that you’re positive you’re ready because this post is about to go to a really weird, morbid place.
If you were to die in your house and no one were to find you for awhile and you owned a cat, the cat would eat you to stay alive.
If you were to die in your house and no one were to find you for awhile and you owned a dog, the dog would not eat you and starve to death instead.
**I had to stop writing at this point because my dog just consumed bits of the plastic water bottle I didn’t notice it was chewing. It won’t eat me as a last ditch effort to stay alive, but it will ingest plastic for no real reason at all. Wow. **
First, I was disgusted at this news. I felt betrayed, thinking that my cat would eat me to stay alive. My love for Prandtl grew exponentially as I thought about her, laying next to me, refusing to eat me because she was far too loyal.
But then I thought about it longer, and I suddenly thought Prandtl was an idiot. She’s a wild animal, for God sakes. She wasn’t raised eating ceasar salads and filet mignon. Her ancestors hunted for their food and stalked their prey to get it, but she wouldn’t eat me to stay alive? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. She just lost a ball under the entertainment center and it looks like her brain is going to implode as she thinks about how to get it back.
So after careful consideration, I’m not hurt that cats are willing to eat their owners to stay alive. I’m not disgusted. It’s self preservation. They gotta do what they gotta do. I mean, as long as I’m not waking up in the middle of the night to find Lucy gnawing on my arm with a crazed look in her eye, I’m fine. I respect that she will do whatever she has to do to stick around. And I certainly don’t blame her.
And honestly, usually conversations like this gross me out. I’m usually really squeamish whenever it comes to anything dealing with the deceased or zombies eating one another. So sorry if you threw up in the middle of reading this, but I just couldn’t let this one go.
