It’s around eight o’clock and I’m on my fourth floor condo when I see a mama duck with four adorable babies downstairs and I decide I’m going to go down there and take some adorable baby duck pictures. I get downstairs and follow the waddling duckies to the pond (which is actually quite nice) and snap a few crappy pictures because ducks aren’t really into the whole posing thing. Then I look away from the LCD screen and notice AN EFFING ALLIGATOR with its beady little eyes and snout poking out of the water at the very edge of the pond LESS THAN A YARD FROM ME. So I run. Faster than I’ve ever run in my whole life. Across the garden, into the building, down the hall, and in the elevator. By the time I make it back home I’m panting and my heart is racing and I can barely get out the words “There’s an alligator in the pond.” And of course my monolingual and hard-of-hearing father yells “Que?” at my mother and she has to translate as I head for the couch, hyperventillating, because I was not about to repeat myself.
Now, there’s a lot of little kids and pets in this complex, so I figure I should Alert the Authorities, in the form of our security guard and the Nuisance Alligator Hotline. So I drive around looking for the security guard, and when I find him our conversation goes like this:
Me (leaning out the car window, cause you KNOW I wasn’t going to walk around with an alligator on the loose): Excuse me! There’s an alligator in the pond!
Security Guy: Yeah. We know.
Me: Well did you call to have it removed?
SG: No, it’s just a baby.
Me: Um, yeah, but they grow up and there’s pets and kids running around back there.
SG: Well, the kids don’t go in the pond.
Me (exasperated): But the alligator can come out!!!
And then I drive off to call the Nuisance Gator hotline only to find out that they only work 8am-5pm monday through Friday, because apparently alligators only venture out and about in Florida during business ours. They’re executive alligators, as Eddie Izzard might say. So I head back to my building and there’s a neighbor downstairs playing fetch with his long-haired daschund so I walk up to him and tell him there’s an alligator in the pond, because I’m thinking that little leash-less doxie would look quite delectable to a hungry gator. And the guy tells me “Oh, I know, it’s fake.” Yes apparently some kids were playing by the pond and one of them thought the gator looked fake, so my neighbor went and got a stick and poked the POSSIBLY fake gator. When it was determined that it was indeed fake, the guy pulled it out and examined it. He informs me that it was quite realistic looking and that somebody did an excellent job of taping it to a piece of styrofoam. Then I guess he carefully put it back in the water exactly as he found it so it could scare the bejeezus out of me. Thanks, buddy.
Tags: alligator, asthma, bureaucracy, hoax, prank
