The Queen.

I'm not sure if cockroaches are irresponsible and vindictive, but I know for the a fact that they are downright filthy. The Queen of the Cockroaches does exist. Her name is Geetha Kaur and she now lives in Puchong.

We know that our office building is host to a republic of roaches but we also know that if you keep your office clean, you effectively keep them at bay. Since the arrival of the Queen of the Cockroaches at our office, we have noticed bolder appearances of the roaches in the office. We had the pest control do their thing but the roaches were still all over the place, but especially at her corner. The roaches essentially have a par-tay after she leaves the office. Sometimes we go to her place to leave her messages or answer the phone and the roaches will be crawling all over the table, monitor and phone. If you lift up a file, you essentially uncover a whole slew of roaches hiding for some privacy. I swear that there are times when they are doing the Conga across her table. We have repeatedly told her to keep her place clean, just the basics - if you're gonna eat in the office, throw out all the packaging; do not leave your packed teh tarik in the office overnight and just general cleanliness but she would tell us that it was just that the place was ridden with cockroaches. We would still find her wastepaper basket full of food wrappings, her tea would be curdled in the plastic bag, days old. Once when she decided not show up for work for a few days, we found 3 or 4 takeaway microwavable containers with food remnants on her table. When we asked her if she wanted to save the containers she just smiled with embarassment. When we were cleaning up my present room which was rarely used then, we didn't find a single cochroach. Not one. The room was ideally dark, suitable for roaches except that maybe it was too clean. There was even a cockroach in the scanner and when you asked her to scan something, she would happily scan your document and it was possibly a proud moment for her to see her loyal subjects in the finished product. Once I asked her for a file and when I opened the file, I must have raided a cockroach orgy because a whole battalion of cockroaches ran helter skelter all over the file. I threw the file out the door and one of my guys started banging the file on the ground to get rid of them. While all this was happening, she just stood there and laughed.

This is the classic though. She had scribbled someone's phone number on an envelope flap and too lazy to rewrite it in her notebook, she tore off that part of the envelope and pasted it in her notebook with selotape - except that there were cockroach legs beneath the transparent tape. We came up with a possible scenario. The roach was enroute to the dancefloor (i.e the table) and unfortunately got trapped at the tape dispenser. When she discovered this she just flicked or peeled the roach off while its legs were left stuck to the tape and when she wanted to use the tape she was too darn lazy to dispose the part with the legs. Or maybe she just wanted to keep the legs as a work of art, like the roach in the scanner.

Thankfully, she has left the office and miraculously, there are no more cockroaches in the office. We only spotted one a couple of months ago and that was it. That is why she is the Queen of the Roaches. Her loyal subjects left along with her. For the past year we have been mocking her and what she does when the roaches cross her path during the day. Yesterday, we went out for dinner and the office boy confirmed our mockery. He said that she just picks them up or flick them off when they walk on the glass portion of her table, nonchalantly brushes them off her table, stumps them with the back of her pen or snaps them dead with her ruler. The girl that sits at her place now also recently discovered a whole archipelago of chewing gum under the table.

Totally disgusting. But you know what is the scarriest thing? Now that she is married, she claims that she is the one that does the housework. I suppose her house must be the new Cockroach Central.