What this sound actually is remains a mystery other than the fact that it lives inside a sealed Fuser box inside a photocopier. Turning this photocopier off is out of the question as offices from all around the country send us printed documents to that machine that we in turn distribute and input into other machines. It is the lifeblood of our questionable existence.
Now, upon hearing this sound I was instantly reminded of my life when, as a concierge in a busy hotel back on the Gold Coast, in Australia, we had a plague of Mole Crickets infest our lobby.
The Mole Cricket.
Our lovely hotel was a block away from an entire block of the city that had been stripped of buildings in preparation for an enormous and amazing hotel. The promised hotel lay in the hands of some architects and developers for over 2 years and the boarded up block went back to its natural inhabitants seamlessly. Oh nature, your simple brilliance abounds.
Finally the day came when the sweat and tears of the planners and developers was transferred into physical motion. With bulldozers.
Mother Nature had to relocate fairly quickly and according the Mole Crickets that had set up an entire city in there, the next best thing was to find a hotel before a permanent domicile could be found. I guess their insurance would pay for the rooms in the meantime?
What this meant for me, the man in charge of greeting guests and looking after luggage, was that every time our enormous double glass doors slid open, anywhere from 5 to 15 of these enormous, threatening and brazen insects would hop on in. If left unchecked (the word “unchecked” in this sentence refers to a foot coming down rather heavily, directly over said Cricket, causing it to change shape quite rapidly and fairly fatally – most times) these crickets would find lodging within our marble tiled lobby filled with ample cracks and spaces, anywhere and everywhere they could. And it turned out that three or more of these little bastards in close proximity would actually activate the motion sensor on the door. I have to admit though that watching our guests, primarily Japanese school children, trying to circumnavigate the mobs of black, scary bugs was admittedly lots of fun.
For 3 nights we manned the doors. We actually ended up having one of us, full-time, employed to tread on Mole Crickets before they set up in convenient little holes all over our lobby. Whilst we were fairly successful, at least 30 of them found home in our lobby and for the next few weeks, we had the almost constant chirping of these creatures as they communicated and made jokes about our silly outfits to each other from the relative safety of the crevices of our marble halls.
As a man easily irritated by the inane, their relentless chirping started to drive me insane by the end of the first night. By the second week of this I was no longer to be toyed with. I had developed a path to the elevators that, by some choreographed stomping, would silence all of these hold-outs before I would ascend with messages, luggage, towels, bills and trolleys to our real guests. Leaving our lobby in a state of pleasant quiet.
I said that these Crickets moved into the ‘relative safety’ of our lobby as we, after a short amount of time, developed a way to silence them permanently using a combination of stealth and brute, murderous, deadly, high-pressured force.
We thankfully possess cans of Insect killer built for the harshness of our little Aussie friends the Cockroaches. Cockroaches are usually around an inch to 3 inches depending on how high up you were in our 48 story building (only the biggest ones can fly that high – they come in through the balconies). The insect killer cans were akin to fairly large fire extinguishers and combining them with a stealth-like approach (the Crickets stopped chirping upon approach at about 3 feet away) we would simply drown the offending crack with a long blast from the spray until it was flooded with the evil, killer chemical.
This had the desired affect and soon our lovely lobby, though slightly pungent from the spray, was once more serene and still – when it was not filled with hundreds of sun burnt Japanese School children fighting over their luggage.
I told the crew of the Miserable Workplace this story as we lamented the irritating and continual chirping squeak, showed them the image, and all agreed that the squeak is not that bad after all.
Except me. I would gladly trade the ability to stamp and crush that noise once and for all over having to sit here and endure it day after day.
Maddening.
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