The Hole in the Office Floor

A Capuchin monkey (Cebus ssp.) in a leafy environ that is not my office

The prairie dogs gnawed through my home office floor and escaped on February 2. After they left, I plugged the hole up with hay and made a masking tape “X” over it. When I got home last night the floor was a fine, smooth, solid wooden floor again.

At work this morning there is a hole in the floor near my desk and a medium-sized wicker dog basket in the “shady” corner of the communal office with a capuchin monkey in it, curled up sleeping. Phaye found it and at first she thought it was a strangely colored raccoon. When she saw that it was a monkey she was very worried since she was pretty sure that we didn’t have any monkey chow and the local independent pet store was unlikely to have any. At first she thought that it was dead, but it woke up and stared at her then went back to sleep, like a cat, which is not proper monkey behavior. It should have been screaming, bouncing off the walls, exploring everything, and shredding up all that it could see. And who knows what it would have been doing if it was frightened.

This is not good. The prairie dogs were at my house and didn’t smell bad. They’re vegetarians and poop out little hard pellets. The monkey will to be pooping let’s just say not-pellets all over the office. I hate for that to be such a top priority, but we’ve got a lot of computer equipment. When Dirk came in he went down to the Stop ‘n’ Rob to see if they had any fresh food, but of course they didn't. So Dirk got some dog food and Nacho Doritos. Once the monkey woke up—he was a male-- he was happy to eat both.

A monkey coming into the Probably Space Monkeys Being & Nothingness Cam Project headquarters. What are the odds? But there he is, a calm and relaxed monkey, not at all sick or weird, hanging around the office like your basic employee. Maybe he’s on Ativan. He played with and shredded all of our paper products and right now he’s in the break room playing with Tom’s Rubik’s Cube (Dirk says rubric cube). Tom thinks that we should call the Humane Society. Phaye said she’ll do some monkey diet research, and I said fine, so long as her only source isn’t Wikipedia. We haven’t let him have any coffee.

Sia said he must be a space monkey, so we’ve had to name him Space until we find out his real name. Phaye printed up flyers and is posting them everywhere. I’m not thrilled with the prospect of people coming to the office, since I’m not supposed to be running a business out of what is essentially a house, but how many people can have lost a monkey?