When the cat’s away….

… the mice will play. Apparently.

The boss has been away today so this particular little phrase has been tossed around the office with restrained abandon (if you think that’s a tautology, you’ve clearly never been a public servant).

The phrase might be fine, in and of itself, except I’ve never actually seen a mouse do anything that would suggest to me that it was in a particularly playful state of mind (excluding, of course, these two. However, I have been (un)reliably informed that they are, in fact, not real mice. Sure. Next they’ll be saying a weird little chick in a tu-tu didn’t buy all the teeth (at greatly reduced rates, mind) I put under my pillow when I was a kid). Every mouse I’ve ever seen was desperately emaciated and scrounging for rancid scraps; skittish and fleeing in terror at the slightest movement; mindlessly running around and around in some sort of wheel-like device, never going forward, never going back, just spinning and spinning, trapped in a lab; or cruelly crushed in a spring loaded death-trap.

If that's play, I think I'll pass.

EDIT: And then the boss returned, discovered there were a couple of things that needed to be updated yesterday (literally, not figure of speech) and we've all been hammered with work in the last 45 minutes. Woo. And now I go home...