Wall Cat

Our office environment is a little different from what we've come to expect on the mainland. The first time I saw a cockroach in the building's atrium I almost flipped out. I quickly learned this is a daily occurrence. A few weeks later, when a mouse interrupted a civil division meeting, I didn't bat an eye, seeing as the corner of every door in our office has been chewed to allow access to all the offices for rodents. Living and working in the tropics, this is what you need to deal with.

That was until we started having an uninvited guest in our Attorney General office suite. At the beginning of last week one of the other assistant attorney generals complained about hearing a cat crying while she was on the phone. This isn't unheard of. Supposedly the public defender's office has a cat that lives in the ceiling and raids food from people's desks. Between all the pests we deal with, a cat in the crawl space may help contain the rodent population.

I was on the phone later in the week when I had my encounter with "Wall Cat," as the creature stalking our vents and ceiling tiles has come to be called. I was talking with a workmen's comp claimant on the phone when I started hearing some meowing coming from the wall. Every time I'd say something during the phone call, the wall would call out to me with sorry pleas for attention and chow. There being a wall between me and the feline, there wasn't much I could do to either help it or remove it from it the premises.

Eventually, I got off the phone and the cat must have wandered off, since I stopped hearing it. Unfortunately, I did start smelling it, or at least its urine. Turns out, Wall Cat peed in the wall. Yuck. I made it through the afternoon by snagging a candle from Sara's office and some gritty olfactory determination.

I assumed that this was the worst that Wall Cat could inflict on us. I was wrong. Monday showed us how much destruction this unseen demon could wreck. Over the weekend, Wall Cat had managed to find a hole through the wall, into the office of the assistant AG who deals with all the HR issues. The cat preceded to use her office as a litter box for Saturday and Sunday. She spent Monday with her office door open, vacuuming, burning candles, spraying down her office with every available cleaner and the stench was still over powering. She ended the day sprinkling Febreeze and baking soda all over the carpet and vacuuming the place twice over the next morning.

The smell had slackened slightly by today, but it still lingered enough that everyone who entered the office caught a whiff of Wall Cat. By the end of the day, the stench had departed all the offices except the one poor HR attorney's that had been the cat's out house all weekend. She was still suffering through the retch inducing odor of cat piss. The pained look on her face said she was counting the hours until her contract's up in September and she gets to return to the mainland.

Some things about practicing law in Samoa just can't compare to anywhere else.