Stood Up by My Roach Killer

           

            On Monday morning I spent four hours getting my kitchen and bathroom ready for a cockroach treatment. For almost a whole year I’d had most of the books and papers from the bedroom and living room shelves piled up in the middle of the kitchen floor because I wanted to keep those areas free of clutter so as to be able to fight the bedbugs more easily. Now that the blood pests were gone I was able to free up the kitchen. There was a lot of vacuuming to do after that. It looked relatively uncluttered for a few seconds before I had to take all my food from the kitchen shelves and pile it up on the kitchen table, thus making it look messy in a whole new way. I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted to do, but the major areas of infestation were free. Sundar, the superintendent, had told me that I wouldn’t need to put the cats outside because Orkin wouldn’t be spraying poison this time, as they have a new “medication” for the cockroaches, which is a type of dust. I had to leave for work a little after 11:00, but I left my door unlocked for the exterminator. I saw Sundar in the donut shop downstairs and went to ask him if he was sure I didn’t need to put my cats outside, because the notice I’d gotten from the landlord had said that I should put the cats outside for six hours. Sundar confirmed that it wasn’t necessary for pets to be out of the apartment.

            It was snowing a bit and the side streets looked slippery, so I took Queen to OCADU. I posed for my first art class of the year for Bob Berger. He likes to have me sit with my laptop while posing, so I sat and read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

            After work I stayed at OCADU to go to the Help Desk to see if I could get the persistent problem fixed of me not being able to log onto the OCADU website in order to view my payroll records. I asked if the problem had something to do with me being a part time employee. I thought that maybe the system expects people to log in more than once a month, but one of the technicians told me that there have been glitches in the system since they started it last year that result from them trying to merge several internet networks that had been functioning separately at the college. Another technician asked me to do a password reset. I told him that I had already tried that at home but he said the “forgot password” option only works for students, when it works at all. Employees of the University don’t have that option and so if they forget their password they have to come to the Help Desk. I expressed the opinion that if the system is only student friendly, perhaps they should have a separate system for employees.

            My ride home was damp and cold, despite the fact that it was sunny.

            When I got home I couldn’t find any trace of an exterminator having dusted my place. I couldn’t reach the landlord and I couldn’t find Sundar, so I called Orkin. They confirmed that a technician had been at my place but the procedure that had been scheduled was a spraying rather than a dusting. If that’s the case, the exterminator might have seen that my cats were inside and just not treated my apartment. I guess dusting is more of a management thing in follow-ups after a spraying. Sundar had the wrong information. I can’t say that I wasted four hours, because the cleaning I did was useful. Hopefully it won’t be long though before Orkin can come again.

            I organized all of my computer files into proper folders and subfolders, and even the porn is categorized according to the name of the actress in each video now.