I sent an email to my admin yesterday (in the post below this one) because our area is infested with fruit flies and it caused some fun churn among both my coworkers and the facilities department. My persuasive prose actually incited a visit from someone who might be able to fix this problem. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a few days. Therefore, I hereby announce the third week of July to be named National Fruit Fly Week!
To “celebrate,” I created this homemade trap using a borrowed cocktail shaker, some bananas, and an index page of a protocol document:
Top view:
I wish I could say I miraculously thought of this on my own, but I didn’t. A friend sent me a blog post he found about catching fruit flies with salsa. (This link contains a how-to and the logic behind the design.) Their results were better than mine; but my fruit flies are infesting a zillion-dollar global corporation, so maybe they’re smarter than the fruit flies that would infest a regular person’s home.
As I leave work today, the fruit fly status is still pending. Our contact in facilities sent an email to someone more important than he, requesting nightly trash collection and thereby escalating the problem for us. All in all, he was a nice guy. When he came over, he saw the state of my cube and like many others, bit his tongue before exclaiming, “Holy shit that’s nasty!”
After discussing my cube’s sad state of affairs, I gave him the grand tour of the building, showing him just how unreasonable it is to expect us to make special concessions to a backward policy (in the most polite way possible, of course), especially given that we work in a fucking mail distribution center. (This means loading dock doors are wide open for long periods of time, allowing bugs to fly inside.)
I admit with some reservation that I’ve worked in worse conditions. I wouldn’t have expected to draw similarities at this job, though.