My little crawly friends (Part 2)

Five months into my “worms eat my garbage and I could potentially start a potting soil business”, my bossed called me into his office.

“We just bought the ANB portfolio. 3 million accounts.”

“That’s a nice chunk,” I said.

“Yeah but they took too long in the negotiations,” he replied looking annoyed. “We need to get moving on the migration if we want to transition the portfolio into our accounts before the system cut off date.”

“Sure, what are the next steps?” I asked eager to get this long awaited project rolling.

“I need you to fly out to Dallas and meet the team. Detail the processes, who’s working on what and come up with an integration strategy. We need to wrap things up by end of November, systems cut-off would be sometime in December.”

“No problem, I’ll get Ginger to book the ticket and I’ll forward it to you for Gina’s approval.”

“Thanks,” he smiled. “I can always count on you.”

“Of course he could count on me,” I thought, “wasn’t I the star of the team?”

I spent the next three weeks living between my cramped cubicle in NY and conference rooms in Dallas. On weekends instead of cleaning the parks and collecting leaves for my little friends, I sat in the office calculating loss rates, monthly sales and EBIT. On the rare occasion when I was home, my mother told me we needed to get rid of the wormies. They were starting to smell and fruit flies had taken hold of the dining room. What exaggeration.

But it was true! When I entered the dining room a swarm of fruit flies attacked trying to defend their territory. I counter attacked with a vacuum and sucked them all away (unfortunately, the next day their next of kin come back for a vengeance). The compost bin was becoming too wet and soggy and a stench was working its way from the dining room into the living room.

“Why are there so many orange peels in here?” I demanded of my mother.

“Your brother brought a box of oranges up from Florida.” She looked offended at my questioning. “You said, ‘fruits sure’ so they are in there!” she fired back.

“You can’t put that much orange peels in there! It’s too acidic for them and there is no way they can digest all this food you put in so quickly. That’s why there are flies!” I said frantically removing the peels.

Following the orange peel incident...I would be found busy inputting data onto spreadsheets while shredding A4’s under my desk at work during the day. At night, I would rush home (after midnight) to swat at fruit flies and then check to see if the bin was overloaded or needed some cardboard, soil or leaves to balance the ph. This meant there was a good chance I had to scrounge around the neighborhood at 2 am. Other nights I could be found separating the worms from the finished compost on the dining room table. Thankfully mother was in bed and not there to witness the atrocity being done to her dining table.

As the portfolio migration date came nearer things became more hectic -- more late nights in the office, more flying out to Dallas. Some days I was tied up in meetings all day, which meant I had no time to shred A4’s under the desk. I resorted to shredding junk mail I had to retrieve from the dustbin, of which I had to separate the matte from glossy (worms don’t like glossy). The fruit fly situation was getting worse. The sticky fly strips and the sugary funnel traps I set up across the dining room made the room look like it was being prepared for a flea circus. This forced my family to take their meals in the living room -- not much harm done there; they always watched TV while eating anyways.

The stress of work and the late night worm nursing was doing me in. I found myself incoherent half the time for my daily 9 am meetings. A few times I misquoted numbers or facts in meetings and even forgot a meeting or two. I finally accepted the fact that it was time for the wormies to go.

The following weekend I called a buddy of mine from the Parks Clean Up to come fetch me. “It was time to set the wormies free,” I told him with a despondent tone. He arrived an hour later in his Toyota Corrolla and helped me carry the Chateau Pipeau box out to the car. “Good riddance.” My mother said. But I could tell she secretly worried where the wormies would go and who would be feeding them now?

We found a wooded area in the park half a mile from my apartment. We opened the lid and started slowly pouring the contents onto the soil. I realized this is where they belonged, in the wild with all of their ants, beetles and buggy friends. I had no right to keep them trapped in a wine box up in a 30 story apartment building.

But how does one bid goodbye to worms? “Go, fly and be free.” (No, no that line is for birds) Instead I said, “Goodbye wormies, go on...crawl to your new home. And watch out for those damn birds!”