Inexperienced | JENLISA

2

"I swear to God, if you don't stop licking yourself, I'm going to take that sandpaper tongue of yours and snip it off with a pair of scissors, and you know what? I'll enjoy doing it, too!" I shouted to Sir Licks-a-Lot, the orange tabby who insists upon hanging out in my office around one every day for his daily bath regimen.

"What did I tell you about talking to the cats?" Chahee, my co-worker, asked as she stood in my doorway. "It's not healthy, Jennie."

"Nothing about this office is healthy," I said, while I had a stare-down with Sir Licks-a-Lot. "Stop staring at me with your tongue half out; it's creepy!"

As if he owned my office and everything in it, he sat up straight while maintaining eye contact with me, puffed his chest out, and then yacked up a hairball, right on my desk.

"Eck, gross!" I screamed as I backed away from the orange puke ball.

With a smarmy look on his face, he lifted his paw, wiped his mouth, and then jumped off my desk.

"Did you see that?" I asked Chahee, who was on the floor laughing at me. "I think he gave me the middle finger while wiping his mouth."

"Cats don't have fingers," Chahee corrected in between giggles.

"Middle claw then, he gave me something, that's for sure."

"Are you going to clean that up?" Chahee asked while pulling herself off the floor and into one of the cat-scratched chairs that sat in front of my desk.

"Nope, planned on saving it for dinner," I stated sarcastically.

"You're disgusting."

I grabbed a wet nap from my desk; I kept a stockpile of them in there for this very reason, cleaned up the hairball, and threw it into my trash can, hating every aspect of my life in the process.

Deflated, I leaned back in my chair and said, "Don't you get tired of being in this office? The cats are starting to drive me insane. This can't be sanitary."

"Hey, just be happy you're not an intern whose duties are feeding the cats, grooming the cats, and making sure the litter boxes are always clean in the shit room."

The shit room.

I've only been in there once, and it was because it was my first day and I was getting a tour of the office. The offensive cat pee smell was so awful that I have yet to even go near the room since. The shit room was where all of the litter boxes were held, and I'm not talking about the little tray litter boxes, I'm talking litter boxes the size of a ship from BattleStar Galactica. They were perched on different shelves and on different levels of the room. It was an intern's nightmare.

"How do we even hold interns for so long?"

"Desperate college students," Chahee replied while looking down at her nails. "They will do anything to get an in with a print magazine these days, even if it means being a walking scratching post."

"That reminds me, did a shipment of Cat Emery Boards come in for me? I'm supposed to do some kind of exposé on them, but have yet to receive the box."

"Not that I know of, but you can ask Susan up front; she's the one who handles all the UPS shipments, which, by the way, did you see her outfit the other day? She was in full-on slutty Grandma mode."

Susan was our receptionist, a certifiable crazy cat lady herself, who had a major crush on the UPS man. Whenever she knew he was coming in, she donned her red lipstick that always wound up on her teeth, her blue eye shadow, which was sixty years too young for her, and a low-cut top that always seemed to wreak havoc with her old lady bras.