Oddest animals you've found at work?

[wagegoth]

Not in the office, but right outside, raccoons and Mallard ducks. One night I was leaving work and there was a mama raccoon in the street that was so big I knew that if I hit her my car would suffer the most damage. She was blocking traffic so her babies could cross the street.

We have opossums in our home neighborhood. I've told the kids to not go near them, and most of the local animals know better, or learn quickly, to leave them alone. They're like millions-of-year-old flashbacks.

[ForestDragon]

During summer cleanup at my school last year I found and rescued a praying mantis that had somehow gotten into the building and was in the middle of a hallway. After inspecting the critter with great interest (they're kinda rare around here) and showing it off to my coworkers, I took it outside and put it in one of the shrubs beside one of the side entrances.

On another occasion - about March of this year - I was out doing my usual post-lunch litter-gitting. I was so into grabbing this wrapper, that cup, the other bottle that it took a while for it to dawn on me that I wasn't seeing the usual array of birds that usually contest me for the edible garbage, nor did I hear the pigeons on the roof, though the crows were raising more hell than usual for some reason. I straightened up, looked to my right - and saw a large red-tailed hawk, no more than ten feet away from me, eating a pigeon. She (from the size, I figured it was female) looked at me warily; I watched her for a bit then went back to picking up garbage. I suppose she figured I wasn't going to attack her or steal her meal, because she went back to eating her pigeon. I for one was happy to see something was going to put a dent in the flying rat population. Sadly, I haven't seen her since, though I have picked up bits and pieces of dismembered pigeons on occasion, so I suppose she's still around.

[Discourtesy Clerk]

There was a guy in the store the other day with a parrot on his shoulder. The bird was really well-behaved, too - it didn't squawk, or flap around, and most of the customers in the vicinity didn't even notice he had it. I thought that was pretty cool.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

When I worked at WOLO, there was a very, very large alligator turtle in the tape room. I had put it there. Found it in the parking lot and put it into the room until I got off. Took it home and put it into a pond out in the woods nearby with the others. Didn't want it to get run over.

And while I was working public television, I did a stint as the production coordinator for a show called NatureScene (yeah, you can figure out where I worked from that, and I don't care. Most of those people over there can pucker up and kiss my ass, crew of NatureScene excluded.)

Anyway, it was not unusual to have snakes, lizards, turtles, and God only knows what else in the hotel rooms while working on that show. We toted around a snake in a pillowcase for a couple days once. The housekeepers would not touch our rooms with a ten foot pole. Once I had a huge black snake we'd found in the road dead coiled up next to the beer in my room refridgerator. That was an interesting year.

[notspearsdamnit]

We never had any strange animals at the health club but the outdoor live theatre was a different story. We have had bats and owls fly over the stage (a bat actually flew into an actor one time and one in the men's dressing room). We had a family of opossums living backstage this summer. Last summer a tarantella crawled out of a wall back stage onto an actor and totally freaked him out.

[Mixed Bag]

it was not unusual to have snakes, lizards, turtles, and God only knows what else in the hotel rooms...Once I had a huge black snake we'd found in the road dead coiled up next to the beer in my room refridgerator.

Pity the desk clerk when you complained about being automatically billed for removing THAT from the minibar

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I think if they'd known about that little souvenier, I'd probably had gotten thrown out into the street! This was one of the nicer hotels we got to stay at.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

All I get is Palmetto bugs and customers FREAK when they see them. They think they are roaches.

Honey, they ARE roaches. Horrible, nasty, freakishly large roaches.

[bars.of.a.rhyme]

The only animals we get in my store are the customers...well, them and the roaches.

This is sorta OT since it didn't happen at work, but as we were driving through Indiana a few weeks ago we saw this shape scurrying across the interstate (I-90 I think, but I wasn't driving, so I don't remember), and it turned out to be a river otter.

Otters!

Anyway, the roaches disappeared recently, after a year or so of being pretty ubiquitous. My coworker/boyfriend got fed up and bought some traps from the drugstore in our strip mall, and that cleared the problem right up. Funny, the exterminators who came out once or twice didn't put a dent in the population. It's as if they were spraying liquid roach treat instead of poison.

I was the first person to discover the roaches. I lifted up a tablecloth to get to some merchandise, and one JUMPED ON MY ARM! I brushed it off and ran around screaming some very choice words. Luckily, nobody was in the store except my then-manager, who laughed her ass off.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Oh, MAN, I hate roaches. Why, I don't really know, phobias do not have logic to them. Snakes, spiders, etc, no problem. I can't handle a roach.

[LostMyMind]

Honey, they ARE roaches. Horrible, nasty, freakishly large roaches.

Florida's Palmetto bugs are a cross between beetles and a roach. That's why you can pound a palmetto bug with a shoe 5 times and watch it get up and middle-finger salute and fly away. However, I rather have a palmetto bug than a german roach.

[Rosakala]

Florida's Palmetto bugs are a cross between beetles and a roach. That's why you can pound a palmetto bug with a shoe 5 times and watch it get up and middle-finger salute and fly away.

Oh so true!

[Bella_Vixen]

We have opossums in our home neighborhood. I've told the kids to not go near them, and most of the local animals know better, or learn quickly, to leave them alone. They're like millions-of-year-old flashbacks.

We used to have a dog that killed any/all opossums that would dare to come into our backyard. It was scary to go out there every morning and see numerous 'possum corpses everywhere. ::shudder::