“I don’t care if you have to hunt through every alley from here to Chicago! You find me my thirty cats!”
I really wanted the satisfaction of slamming a phone down into its cradle, but since I was using a cell phone, the best I could do was hit the “end call” button particularly viciously and jam my finger.
“Ouch!”
Maybe they have an app for slamming a phone down?
I dropped my cell phone down on my desk and sat down in my black, pleather, ergonomically sound chair. Placing my head ever so gently in my hands, I reminisced about how I came to have the job that I was presently so spectacularly failing at.
I was down on my luck, out of work, living at home, and an old school chum let me know about a job opening at the university. He said that with my background in marketing, it might be a good fit, but I should have known something was up when I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before I even had an interview. In retrospect, it might have been prudent to actually read the three page document that I signed, but I was desperate for the job you see. Then, when I showed up for the interview, I sat in a non-descript room with a conference table and chairs for about twenty minutes sweating my…well, sweating a lot, and so not prepared when the coach of the university basketball team walked in. I shot out of my seat with embarrassing clumsiness, proffering my moist hand.
“Sir, I’m very pleased to meet you.”
Grasping my hand in an iron grip that nearly crushed my digits into powder, he graced me with that pearly grin that the cameras love. “Pleasure. Please sit down.”
What transpired next was the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had with anyone about cats. More precisely kittens. And now, here I am thirty kittens short of a national title.
Stirring from my daydream, I flipped open my laptop to surf local kitten breeders. We didn’t have a lot of funds to work with, but I might be able to purchase a few hoity-toity purebred little fluffs to pad the basket as it were. I read the first few advertisements then gave up on the idea in disgust. Breeders are too fussy, want records of everything.
“Damn!” Again, I wanted to be violent and slam my laptop shut, but these things are expensive so I clicked it down softly. As I paddled my brain for additional ideas on how to procure more kittens, the darn thing wandered off again.
This time to my sitting in a pub years prior, watching a game on the over-sized television and having a drunk fan next to me spewing garbage about animal sacrifice in the NCAA basketball circuit. I’d laughed, laughed right in his face. Little did I know how right he was. All teams have a preference in animal, some like goats, some calves, but they’re rather old-fashioned. My coach, or should I say demon in a coach’s suit, prefers kittens. Not to say that the coach is the demon, the demon that he makes sacrifices to is a demon, but the coach making the sacrifices isn’t much better than a demon. And I, purveyor of said kittens, am not much better than the coach. Anyway, I digress.
The point was I needed kittens now. I jumped out of my seat and began pacing, two minutes away from jumping in my car and tooling about the countryside looking for signs for free kittens. The entire season teetering on the brink, an angry, hungry demon threatening to slaughter an entire basketball team, and it was all up to me and a few mewling fuzz-buckets to save the day. Plucking my phone up off the desk, I reached for my coat. This was no time to fall apart. My cell phone buzzing, I nearly dropped it, but managed to hit the answer button.
“Tell me you’ve got them!”
“Thirty-two, just in case.”
“Thank heavens!”
“But I have to warn you, I heard it through the grapevine that Duke’s got 52 goats.”