Telekinesis

The department dug deep into its kind soul and bequeathed a brand new, blue carpeted, number lock door-ed, swanky big office with giant windows (but sadly, virtually no view if you did not count the inevitable Jignes-bhai smoking cigarette after cigarette outside as an attractive thing to stare at). I was so damn excited. No one had ever done such a thing for me.

But it was time to move our things out of the basement hell-hole with the exploding pipes (it sounded like) and into the new place. I had reams and reams of paper already, although I was there for less than a year. I had papers with my scrawled handwriting. Notes. Notebooks. A few cheap textbooks.

My companions in crime, viz. my office mates, belonged to three categories of human (and yes, there were three of them):
1. An army-trained person with close cropped hair who filed everything neatly, never had an extra piece of paper on his desk (you get the drift)
2. The guy who did everything online, shopping, writing, playing, videos, photos, memories, and thus had nothing to move except his computer.
3. A hairy monster who obeyed no rule known to mankind.

We took an old wheelbarrow and piled it high with our things. The boys carried the computers (we had two giant Dec-Alpha machines we used as servers in addition to small macs on our desks) and other things painstakingly, yelling at me the whole time "Kenny what a waste of skin Why don't you hit the gym a bit more" and such loving things.

We then opened up the filing cabinets. As always mine was filled with all sorts of things. Guy No. 1 had a neat system with labels that one could read and stuff. Guy No. 2 had opted to not have a filing cabinet at all (see above).

Now the final one. We found a bunch of black hair first. EEEEWW I screamed. DOOOOOOD the guys screamed.
WHAT? Oh this.
Splllsssh he just lifted it with his hand and threw it on the floor.

I bravely peered in again after that. Well actually my good friends made me peer in, mildly threatening to shut me up in the cabinet if not. I found the following:
1. Some textbooks in Greek (Of course he is Greek, and damn proud of it)
2. Some loose papers all smushed up
3. An innocuous looking coffee mug

Now the last item caught my interest. I thought. Look. Let the beasts carry everything up. I will wash this mug and pretend to contribute to the exercise. Well, actually the others refused to touch it so I had to.

I found, on closer inspection, that it had a species of spoon sticking out of it. I thought, good, now we have a mug and a spoon, will be handy when we finally get our own office coffee maker and start brewing coffee mmmm the smell of fresh brewed coffee wafting in the mornings as I type 'tail filename' obsessively to see how my simulations have progressed.

But the spoon and mug refused to part from each other. It was, really, less than a year since we had occupied that basement hell hole. So it must have been in like the first week of school that the guy had drunk coffee, stirred it with said spoon, and then thought 'Instead of washing let me put it in the filing cabinet to see what it hatches'

There was encrusted coffee and creamer at the bottom. The spoon resolutely using that as glue. It emitted a faint smell of boiled cabbage.

To his extreme distress, I threw it away, mug, coffee, spoon and all.

You could have washed it, he said plaintively.

Well, I could have, I probably should have, now that I am a mother and have encountered poop of all consistencies and nose-snot in the Tirupati temple on my Kanjeevaram silk, and pee everywhere, and a dabba-full of dhal-rice on the airport floor several times, I would have washed that mug, lovingly even.