One Heck of a Fish Story

Today has been kind of a crazy day at work, but I had to share this funny story with you while I have a minute on my lunch break. I told this story to my co-worker for some comic relief to prevent us from going crazy. This story is a true story and really did happen to me when I worked at a Law Office. So here’s the story….

It was a dark and dreary night….okay so not really, but I worked in a Law Office a few years ago as a legal secretary and had my own office which was very nice. My office was quite large. I think it was meant to be work space for two people, but it was just me at the time. The Law Office was in a u-shape and my office was in the bottom right hand corner of the u. This was one of the main walkways to the break room and lots of people walked by my office each day all day long. As I was used to all of the people walking by all the time, I never really looked up to see who they were unless they poked their head in to say something.

One day, I heard someone walk by my office (not unusual) and then at the same time I heard something that sounded like it had been thrown into my office and hit the floor (very unusual). I looked around but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and who ever had been walking by my office door was gone. I went back into my office and noticed what looked like a dried leaf in the middle of the floor. No big deal, I mean it’s just a leaf right. But the leaf on the floor puzzled me. The cleaning crew came in each night and I didn’t remember seeing that leaf on the floor before. Where did it come from? I know it wasn’t there a minute before. So I went to investigate.

I bent down to for a closer look at this leaf and saw the most unusual leaf I have ever seen. This leaf had scales, a tail, and a big eye looking up at me. It wasn’t a leaf at all. It was a very dry, very dead, very perfectly preserved beta fish. Yuck! Where in the world did this fish come from? Now I was really confused.

I ran to the office next door where my good friend Jeannette worked. I related my story and found her to be just as confused as I was. She suggested that I talk to Trent, one of our attorneys and our resident office jokester, to see if he knew anything about this mysterious fish. I thought for sure, if anyone knew where this fish came from, or if anyone would have thrown a dead fish into my office, it would have been Trent. I studied his face carefully as he peered at the fish still on my floor, looking for any sign that he was in on this mystery joke. No such luck. Either he was very good at his poker face or he was just as surprised as I was.

As a last resort I scooped the fish into a napkin and visited the paralegal office to talk to Cindy. She took one look at the fish and started laughing. Between laughs she gasped, “Where did you find that fish?!” I was confused. Was she the prankster or was there more to this story? I told her the story and she told me that she wasn’t laughing because she threw the fish in my office, but because she had a story of her own about this infamous fish.

Cindy told me that the girl (I don’t know her name, but we’ll call her Beth) who worked in my office before I was hired had a betta fish as an office pet. Now this is where the story gets interesting. I had been working at the Law Office for several months already and I knew that my office was vacant for several months before the office became mine. One day Beth came into her office and her fish was missing. Cindy and Beth searched the office for Betta, hoping to find him sooner rather than later. They thought that the most likely scenario was that that Betta took a giant suicide leap for freedom out of this bowl. They thought for sure they would find him flopping on the floor or the desk somewhere. After searching the entire office, Betta was no where to be found. It was determined that Betta did a Nemo and somehow managed to get to freedom through one of the windows that don’t open or disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again...until 6 months later when I found him plain as could be in the very middle of my office floor far from any desk surface.

Cindy carefully wrapped Betta in a coffin of bubble wrap and shipped him over night to his previous master so she could give him a proper burial. Beth wrote a beautiful eulogy to her long lost friend Betta so he would forever be remembered. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of it.

So the mystery remains. Where had Betta been for 6 months? How did he appear all of a sudden on the floor of my office? I guess I’ll never know.