As metaphorical as the title may seem, it isn’t. This is about a certain cockroach in a corporate office, in my cubicle if you want the details. When I first noticed him (or her, I am no Roach-ologist), I was in the course of making an incredible discovery that could solve the world food crisis. All right, I was surfing the Internet; aaarghhh, all right, I was Facebooking. But that is not what this post is about, it is about Cockroach Jr.
The protagonist is a brown, not completely unfortunate-looking insect belonging to the species Jabumba Jabusa (I am in no mood to Google a pest’s scientific name, to sound intelligent to you). He was the size of three peas together. Imagine small peas, if you please.
All the time, I had learnt about cockroaches outliving the dinosaurs, I didn’t believe.
I thought the Roach-ologists were seriously confused when they said that. But when I saw Cockroach Jr come to life after my seventeen unsuccessful and three almost successful attempts to murder it, I should admit, the dinosaurs with their bird-sized brains didn't have a chance. The intelligent patterns the protagonist adopts in his fight for survival and his urge to irritate me are as follows:
They move close to things you do not want to disturb. Glasses, ceramic plates or like in my case, the laptop with a dock so sensitive that a light breeze could disrupt connectivity. They never run in the same direction for long. They keep their movements hard to predict. For example, when you chase an ant and there is a wall, you know it would take one of the three paths (up, left or right) not in the case of the trained GI Joe cockroaches. They look yuck and by the time you make sure that the file you are holding is ok to have a shapeless squiggly stain, they run out of sight.
They come taunt you every possible time when they are prepared, so that when they are really unprepared the probability that you notice that your chances aren’t that futile, is low. The most important of them all, the smirking face. That lopsided grin (I bet I saw him look up and smirk at me, kinda like Jerry irritates Tom, as I waited for him to get out of the proximity of my laptop) he gives every time he peeps out of the multitude of wires to provoke me! My self-esteem jumps down a cliff, every time. I hated them during Zoology labs, I hated them with all the 'Hit' and 'Lakshman Rekha' I could find and now, I hate them because he is no ordinary enemy. Roach-er that!
I was in dire need to prove the superiority of the human race over the infamous cockroaches to that scheming, sitcom mother-in-law kind of cockroach in my cubicle. They might have got away with the dinosaurs but not with us, homo sapiens.
Repeated attempts of provocation from my enemy led me to lose my cool and that could mean only one thing, WAR. Not that I had any consideration for the rules of war then. All this happened when I actually started getting used to having a cockroach in my cubicle. No big deal. People actually have dogs and.... cats! Yes, cats! Those furry little beings that don't care one bit for you but need your pillow. The cockroach, I thought, would actually be fun to have. Maybe he wasn't trying to irritate me and only wanted to be a friendly neighbour.
But then he got “occupational”. He started occupying the interiors of my laptop. He sat in there all day, never came out for lunch or snacks, no matter whether the fans inside were whirring or not. I swear he had a whole deluxe suite inside. Not that I minded, god knows what other bugs were already living in there.
Then maybe he was bored of the whole indoor thing, he tried to pop out every five minutes. Open-minded as I am, it is still hard not being embarrassed when your pet cockroach decides to be the show-stopper in every single show of yours. No matter how interesting you are or how much you know about Harry Potter, people seem to ignore all that when they see this cockroach. Some people loved him, some detested him. No matter what, he always took the limelight.
That is when I decided to draw them, boundaries. My rules were simple. He could stay anywhere in my cubicle. My desk phone, cupboards, the dustbin that I never use, the tangled mess of wires, any document, any useless scrap of paper. He would have complete access to all of those. I would stay away from them as much as I could. The only places he would not be allowed to climb upon were my laptop, my chair and my shoes. It seemed to me that we had a mutually beneficial deal, but being the bug that he was, he did not agree. The pop-up frequency increased and he was in no hurry to get out of my over-heated laptop. I tried to push him away once and almost toppled off.
That was the limit. There was no room for diplomacy with this pest. Oblivious to the 20-odd people within hearing distance sitting around engrossed with their own lives and cockroaches, I got fired up and start charging at him mercilessly. Ah, trying to hide in the most unreachable region between my docking station and laptop will not work this time.
I removed the laptop and, unmindful of what happened to it, dropped it somewhere on my desk and kept track of him with such rapid attention. In a last attempt at gallantry, I pushed him off the table and tried to scare him off with my feet. That’s when he did the stupidest thing any soldier who was running away from the battle could possibly do: he climbed on to my shoes. Screw Gallantry! With one final shrug of my legs, he was on the carpet again and I with the fury of a fed-up human killed him with my heavy feet. I turned back to being the civilised me again, the idea that people could actually see me finally dawned upon me. After a minute of useless staring at the monitor, I turned back remembering his earlier deviousness, to confirm that he was indeed dead. And from the site of the battle and post-mortem, I write this final account on how I killed my short-lived friendship and got an ugly stain on my shoe.
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