hell take us, heaven can wait

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

“You mean you locked up a pack of curious, highly competitive persistence predators with NO enrichment in the enclosure? You FOOLS! If you had bothered to throw a basketball or half a box of Legos in there, KE-X9 would still be alive!

Like they’re totally unable to figure out what’s happening because the cameras keep going out, but every night things get moved, or stolen, exhibits are disappearing, WHAT IS GOING ON, they’ve moved facilities twice and it’s still happening, are they haunted, are the ancestors angry, WHAT IS HAPPENING!?

And then a weary humanologist is all ‘… your humans are getting out’. 

“That is impossible.” 

“They’re getting out.” 

“That enclosure is COMPLETELY SECURE.” 

“And yet somehow they’re getting out.” 

“THE HUMANS ARE NOT GETTING OUT.” 

“Oh yeah? I bet you twenty glarks they’re getting out. Stay after closing time with me and I’ll show you.” 

*next day*

“… the humans were getting out.” 

“… why did they keep going back in, then?!”

1 - at our own zoos the MOST notorious jail breakers are the orangutans, who exploit all manner of methods, including literal lock picking. One orangutan, Ken Allen escaped several times WHILE THE ZOO WAS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC without getting caught by watching Zoo employees, even when they tried to disguise themselves as tourists to catch him at it. While he was being “secretly” surveilled, he managed to escape AND show the other orangutans how to escape. They finally found out he was doing some thought-to-be-impossible rock climbing to escape. To fix it, they brought in a team of human rock-climbers to locate all possible methods of climbing out. So. Humans would absolutely be the worst to try to keep contained. Like, “escape rooms” are currently seen as a fun date idea. I’m sayin.

2 - animals that escape most often return to their own enclosure (after all that’s where their beds and dinners are, and if the zoo is any good it is the place best suited to their species-specific needs for miles and miles) after they have had sufficient excitement. Ken Allen the orangutan would escape and wander around the zoo looking at the animals like he’d bought a ticket. So if the keepers were nice, and formed a bond, and the set up was comfy, once the human knew they could get out if they really wanted, they’d probably go back, depending on how uncomfortable/dangerous the alien environment was.

“Rescued” humans who weren’t thriving in the wild. (Aka dire medical debt.)

Made sure to take an entire social troop instead of lone individuals. (Your closest friends/family members are there.)

Offered VERY good care and enrichment.

If it pleases the counsel to consider:

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight