If at First...

They're Back! The little furry things with black and white stripes, and this time they have followed me to work. My office is out in the trailer trash section of our work complex, where we have set up a several modular units because we grew too large for our building. Now I realize that there is some benefits to dieting.

Well, a family of skunks have moved in under one of the units and they let us know every now and then that they are in the neighborhood by letting off a little squirt here and there. Well, even folks in my trailer trash part of the world had enough of that so they became determined to put an end to these skunk's doctrine of manifest destiny.

Of course they came to me to address the problem because the stories of my adventures with these wily critters have become legendary. Well, more specifically, the tales of my wife's release program have kept the crowds going at the water cooler. So obviously they demanded that my wife and I should team up to get rid of the skunks. I flatly refused. Not because I didn't think that I couldn't catch the little guys, on the contrary, I knew that I could, which was the problem. The difficulty being, as President Bush found out, is the exit strategy. I knew all about the shock and awe with the guns a blazing, but my removal strategies, though I think are quite efficient, have been criticized by the leftist media (my wife's blog).

So, I left our grounds crew supervisor on his own on this one, though, I did give him a lot of advise of actually how to proceed in the operation, of which he ignored most of. This was something that we all would soon regret.

First of all, he bought a trap that could have caught a bear. Oh boy, wouldn't that have been fun if we showed up one morning with a bear in our trap. I mean, a skunk could perform a highwire circus act in there, being able to wave his bushy little tail anywhere he darned well pleased. Next, he placed the trap down a long narrow corridor between buildings with only one way in and one way out. I guess he thought that it would be wise to corner these guys down a long dark alley. Obviously, he hadn't done his homework on war strategy. This may work with destroying tanks in urban warfare, but it only helps a skunk's howitzer when it only needs to aim it's barrel in one direction (effective use of foreshadowing and figurative language, my high school English teacher would be proud of me).

Thinking that this may cause some sort of problem for himself (but I think, not really realizing what this problem could be) he tied a rope onto the trap, leaving the untied end out in the open, out of the alley. Could he have been thinking, "hey, instead of walking up to this trap where I can be sprayed, I will pull the trap to me bouncing it over hard ground, with every tug bringing the trap ever so much closer to myself." Get the visual.

There's not much left to the story. The skunk was caught and the detonation occurred right under my window. Needless to say, we have not seen the grounds guy since then.

I guess this supports the change that I have made to an old adage, "if at first you don't succeed...DON'T BECOME A SKUNK TRAPPER!!!!