At left is Hayley's fish tank as of a week or two ago. The shadowy looking fish is a betta named Brown Trout and the other named is Minnow (a zebra danio, seen in the upper left of the tank). Minnow she's had since high school, BT is more of a newcomer.
BT was sick with fin rot so Hayley put the two fish in a smaller container and worked at cleaning the tank. Twenty minutes later she looks back to find poor Minnow, aged four years, dead, murdered by Brown Trout. Hayley then asked "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground!" (reference) and BT was then renamed Cain. Minnow is in an old jewelry box awaiting burial.
So today Hayley and I went to Meijer in search of a new fish. The problem with going to Meijer during the afternoon is that there are actually people there to help you. When I've gotten fish at around midnight I get to get them myself. During afternoon, you've gotta hope the Meijer pet person is good at netting fish
Danios were on sale this week (fifty cents) so they had a bunch of em. We looked through em and found one Danio that had a spotted tail instead of a striped tail like all the others. This was the one that had to be brought back.
Now I'm sure if theres anything Meijer pet center employees hate, it's having two people come up and ask for one specific, fifty cent fish in a tank full of probably forty other fish, nineteen of which look exactly like it. So to save the Meijer person some trouble and just because, I wanted to do the netting. I had the plastic container filled up and the net just over the water before we were spotted.
An woman with dyed-cranberry, overly styled hair named Ann "helped" us. I handed the net over to her. Hayley and I would stand there looking into the tank trying to point it out to her.
"Oh there he is" one of us would say
"Where?" she'd ask
"There," and we'd keep our finger pointed right at him, following
"Where?" she'd ask again, as if we were pointing wrong, as if she expected us to reach
into the tank a put a finger on him
I kept asking things like "Would you mind if I gave it a shot?" and I explained that I'd done it many times before because I used to work at Meijer. She insisted. I politely asked, she refused in such a polite way that you couldn't do anything (though Hayley later said that she didn't think she was all that polite, maybe I was wrong). I kept offering, she kept refusing, standing there with the net in the water, swirling it back and forth like the net was a wooden ladle and she was making fish soup
Hayley was giving me looks that told me she was thinking what I was thinking--that Ann wasn't going to be able to get this fish and that she was gonna scare the whole tank to death in the process so when Ann asked if we had other shopping to do and maybe wanted to try again later, we got the heck out of pets.
When we came back manilla envelope and toothbrush holder in hand, we scoped out the area to see that Ann was still there. So we hid on one side of an end cap and tried to figure out a plan--someone either of us could get control of the net without being like "hand it over!" We considered saying we bred Zebra Danios and were working on a specific strain. Or that we only had a specific amount of time before we had to be on campus. Or that she could try for five minutes and then we'd switch.
The plan never really got all that fleshed out, we just went up. Ann asked another Meijer person if she wanted to give it a go. She didn't (tsk tsk Meijer team member, you're never too busy to help a guest, but i'm glad you said you were). Ann made us wash our hands and let us have a go. One of us would take the net while the other person tried to pick the Danio out from the crowd. Danios are about the fastest fish you can try and catch and the quick one with the spotted fin was no exception. We caught a small good lookin fella that wanted to be cause as a backup in case we couldn't catch the one with the spot. Probably half hour later we decided to just go with the little guy, who's as of right now is likely settled into his new home on Hayley's desk.
As for names for the new guy, I'm a fan of Seth (reference)