Bert the Fish

As I commented on Queen B today, I kill all living plants with very few exceptions (I think I inherited this trait from my mother). I have had some luck with a bamboo plant that is almost to its third anniversary with me, but my beta fish, Bert, outlived my first bamboo plant. All other plants? Dead.

Back in the days when I was the co-admin of the office, my co-admin and I thought that it'd be neat to have beta fish. She got Ernie, then I got Bert a few days later. It made us happy to come into the office every day and have someone to greet us happily (even if the little guys just wanted to be fed).

The only part that sucked was cleaning out their bowls. I have a fear of flopping fish (aka fish out of water) ever since I was in a pet store when I was younger and watched a little fishy commit suicide by jumping out of his tank and flopping about. On one of our early bowl cleaning afternoons, we safely transported the fishies to their respective cup holding tanks and then assigned one of the sales guys to "fish-sit". We returned to find the sales guy chatting with a colleague and poor little Bert flopping around on the table outside of his cup.

Thankfully Bert was saved and went on to live a long life of about 3 years!