One of the things I like about the Nevada Appeal office is that it appears child-friendly. A lot of people here have toys and other playthings on their desks.
And working late allows me to play with everyone's toys without them knowing.
Tonight I might be hugging their Teddy Bears or bouncing their Superballs off of their cubicle walls or playing Televised L.A. Police Chase with their Hotwheels and model helicopters.
Then again, I might not be. None of them will really know for sure. My mother taught me to return everything I borrow in the same condition as it was in before I had my grubby little hands on it.
Girl Scouts were even more stringent about borrowing: Return everything kindly loaned to you in better condition. Or were we supposed to leave the picnic area cleaner than it was when we arrived? Either way, the idea is to not be a jerk.
My favorite plaything is the office fish owned by Kelli Du Fresne, the Appeal's features editor. Though Kelli is his owner, I'm his closest friend.
I named him Mopey Dick because he isn't the most active plaything I've ever seen. I knock softly on his little container and say hello, he turns around and stares at me. If I awaken him, he turns around, stares at me and appears to cuss at me for disturbing his fish nap. Sometimes I even feed him, if his mother lets me ....
OK, here's the truth about our fish-human relationship: By day, Mopey only appears to be a slightly listless and apathetic male betta fish. By night, however, he is a CIA assassin. I am his supervisor, trainer and confidante.
We tap on his bowl using our own special code to communicate with each other. Or I attach notes to the side of his glass home. If you turn a piece of the sticky-pad paper around and write the note on the backside, the message appears on the right side of the bowl for him to read.
I learned that in spy school. Not Girl Scouts.
These notes contain simple messages -- teaching him to read was difficult because he is a fish -- but we manage:
"I'll pick you up at 7 so we can kill, kill, kill! Then we'll stop by your place before I go back to work. Will two shakes of the fish food Kelli keeps in her drawer be OK for you? You know, the pellets with fish and dried blood meal? I'd prefer pizza, but that's just me."
Mopey has killed 40 some-odd foreign spies and enemies of the United States on my orders. Almost as many as Chuck Barris, the guy who also hosted The Gong Show. Mopey might remember the exact number. I'm simply his facilitator. They teach facilitating at the YWCA and Boys & Girls Club. I don't think they teach it in Girl Scouts.
I only reveal our story because we have left the spy trade. Since we no longer kill foreign enemies, we focus on enemies within the nation's borders.
For a price we will eliminate every owner of a cellphone that plays a silly, loud song. We originally planned to rid the country of every cellphone owner who uses the devices in public rudely, but we would need an army of assassin fish to do the job.
There wouldn't be enough sturdy plastic bags to carry the little killers from their bowls, to the job and back to their bowls again. Mopey sometimes pokes the plastic bags with his tiny guns, knives, nunchuckus and poison darts when we use cheaper, store-brand bags.
We could be persuaded to do a special job if a cellphone's ring, or its user's voice, is especially loud and annoying. And if someone uses a handicapped parking space who doesn't really need it, we could make sure they really need it from now on.
We might even make sure he sleeps with the fishes. Get it?
I was told that I would have to buy an ad in the Appeal if I wanted to elaborate on what double-O -- oops -- I mean Mopey -- can do. We would do just that if we hadn't already taken out an ad in "Soldier of Fortune" magazine.
n n n
"I saw your column before," this guy at the grocery store said. "Do you really think about food and animals that often?"
Before I could explain myself -- Sheesh! Why didn't he ask me how much I actually weighed or how old I really was? -- the guy's cellphone started ringing.
It sounded like it was playing "Frere Jacques" before he answered it. This French children's song asks, "Are you sleeping?"
I waited around for a while to appear polite, but my patience eventually waned. The situation was becoming awkward because the man sounded as if he was fighting with a woman about what he was supposed to pick up at the store. He called her a couple of names that couldn't be printed in a family newspaper.
All I wanted was to get out of that store, get home and get some sleep myself. I quietly backed away from the nosy, cranky man so I could finish my shopping.
Mopey and I will be busy again tonight keeping America safe from annoying music-playing cell phones. So this jerk -- and Francophile -- better be ready.
Terri Harber works on the Nevada Appeal's news desk.
