The story of Owowowowowoooowaaah

Yesterday, I against my habit opened my spam mail box and browsed through some of the titles. One of them seemed even stranger than the other ones:

"Locked in a cage. Need help to get out."

The content of the mail was the following one.

"Dear Sir, because I gather you are not a madame." (So far the author was right.) "I, and my entire family are in a most embarrassing situation. We are locked in a cage at the zoo of x-town. Perhaps I should not be complaining, because we get nourishing food, good health care and we have enough space to get a decent amount of exercise. However, the mere feeling that we are locked in is frustrating. None of us has been able to travel around. We have not seen other countries. We do not even have access to a simple television set.

We share this cage with a large amount of birds. It is an aviary, where the public are allowed to walk around freely. However, there is a lock that verifies that an inner double door is closed before they open an outer one, so we have no way of getting out.

We have tried to call the attention of people of course. We have tried to communicate with them, calling for their compassion. But so far, they have not even shown any sign that they would understand us. It is as if they were speaking a foreign language.

Luckily, today, I managed to grab a laptop from one visitor's bag. He got distracted by some birds, and it was child's play to open his bag and take out the laptop. Luckily his bag also contained a few heavy books, so he did not notice that the bag got lighter. Just to make sure he would not notice anything unusual, I put a number of small pebbles in the bag.

The zoo has a secured wide area network, and I managed to pinch a piece of paper with the password from the pocket of one of the employees.

I googled for people who seemed to have compassion, and found your name. I implore you to help us. I, and the rest of the Northern lesser bamboo lemurs here will be eternally grateful, if you help us out.

Please, do not send any money. Just come to the zoo with a big empty rucksack. You will be able to get all of us out in just a few trips.

Yours faithfully
Owowowowowoooowaaah
(Northern lesser bamboo lemur)"

Wary of this kind of mails, I at first intended to delete it straight away, but in the end, I decided to at least verify it. The story sounded mad, but one never knows.

I went straight for the aviary at the zoo. It was a colossal building at the far end of the African section.

Before entering, I read through the list of species that was displayed by the entrance. Just as I had thought. There were no Northern lesser bamboo lemurs at all - just Southern lesser bamboo lemurs. Furious at their attempt to deceive me, I rushed in. I looked around inside for a short moment and spotted a bridge over a small pond. According to a National Geographic program last week, that is just the kind of place where those little rascals hide things. I grabbed my laptop and left without even saying goodbye.


Not a Northern lesser bamboo lemur at all.

Profitable work

One day at work, I made an embarassing faux-pas. In the men's room, I looked over a door to see if a particular place was free, instead of pulling the handle to feel if it was locked. The doors are not very high, and it seemed so much easier to look over the rim than to noisily pull the handle. If I had thought about it, I would of course not have done it, but my thoughts were elsewhere, and I am not very good at multi-tasking, so there I was, gazing down over the edge of the door on one of my colleagues, who, to my astonishment, was watching a film.

He probably did not even see me. His head was bent down over one of those mp3 players that can show films with impressively high resolution. I realised that this was a strike of genius. He had clocked in. He was at work, so to say, and yet, here he sat watching a film of his own choice, minute for minute, perhaps hour for hour.

I badly wanted to do the same thing, but there was one problem. I do not have one of those little electronic devices. "You could buy one", you say? Not really, because I loathe them. Modern technology and electronic devices frighten me, so I stay away from them.

However, there is a solution to everything, if you only look for it.

The following day, I went in to the men's room late at night with a bucket of paint. I painted the walls and inside of each door with a nice matte white.

The day after was the first day of my active skyving. I told my boss I would make a short break. I then went to my car and picked up my 8 mm film projector, and rushed to the men's room. I switched off the light. That was not easy, as it is lit automatically, as soon as anyone moves in the room, so I had to loosen a lightbulb or two. I then went into one of the four toilets and set the projector up. There were no electric plugs, but I had brought a car battery that should produce enough current. The projector started with a happy crackling noise, as it slowly warmed up. I carefully attached the film roll and stretched the film through the machine. After a few minutes I could finally see the pictures of Casablanca projected on the inside of the toilet door.

At that instance someone opened the door to the men's room.

"Close the door!" I shouted.

The person quickly obeyed. He (I assume it was a he), seemed to feel his way through the room. I temporarily switched off the sound to hear what he was doing. I did this somewhat reluctantly, as Ingrid Bergman had one of her better lines at that moment, but the intrusion was disturbing.

The man (or boy) just washed his hands and then left the room, and I could go back to Bergman and Bogart.

Inevitably, within less than half an hour, someone else came in and tried to use the toilet next to mine. I asked him to flush quietly, and he apparently tried to follow my advice, but there is no volume control on the flush, so I missed an important line.

At 4 pm, I had watched the film twice, so I packed everything, to get some work done, before it was time to go home.

The following day, my boss called me into his office. There was a lot of talk about egotistic behaviour and not showing enough responsibility and respect for my colleagues. However, we soon came to an agreement:

My boss painted the mirror in the men's room white. We put the projector on top of the divider between two toilets, and through holes in the doors, each visitor could watch the film perfectly. My boss got the task to sell pop-corns to the audience, and we share the profits 50/50.