Invasion

There are multiple battles that go on within a pet store.

One of the major opponents within my department, that involves a never ending war is our Snails.

They're a vicious enemy, these pest snails that lurk within our tank system.
We do what we can to get rid of them. Use Chemicals, pull them out, squish them, switch out rocks and decorations, bleach decorations.

And still they return.
Because honestly they probably have a whole hive within the tubes where we can't reach. Where they're safe. Where they can multiply beneath our noses.
Until one day.

They attack.
Swarming through the tanks. Appearing in the gravel, all along the walls.

Causing mass hysteria and panic.

Okay...
That may be a slight exaggeration. Slight.

But basically.
Every now and then, we go from barely seeing any snails....to seeing a ton of them.
Full on mass Invasion.

And the past couple of weeks have been one of the worst onslaughts of the pest snails ever really.

Today, they were out in force. Covering the walls.

And unfortunately, caused a couple of our customers to complain about them.
After all, we're not supposed to have snails in the tanks. >.<

My guess, is that it's the cold water.
As our water in the tanks has been colder than normal, and we discovered why today.
For some reason, all our heaters had been turned off.
But now, we got them working again.

But with the cold water, the snails have grown more bold.

And so I had to detour other tasks in order to set to work on my own plan of attack.
Which basically was hand picking every single one of those snails out that I could see.
Well...at least getting all the ones that were visible on the walls off.

I basically spent two hours doing that.
And got a good cup full of snails for my efforts.

Though I forsee me and my coworkers having to be in major attack mode for the next few days or weeks to get the invasive forces under control again.

But what was funny.
Is that when I was almost done with my first sweep through our multitude of tanks.
The Head Manager saw me.
Pulling snails out.
With bare hands.

And for the oddest reason he pulled out a laytex glove and was like "Wear this!!"
O.o
Why would I wear a glove that would only fill with cold water? It would just mean that I had cold soggy glove around my hand.
But apparently Head Manager wanted me to wear it so I wouldn't be touching those 'dirty snails' directly.

To which I was like: O.o
.....I mean the snails are pests.
But it's not like they'll cause chemical burns or anything. *shakes head*
Why would I need to protect myself from them?
I mean, I've been pulling snails out of tanks for four years now.
Never wore gloves before.
lol.

Such weird logic my manager has.
I'm sure there's a sound basis behind it.
But not one that I understand at the moment. :)

-Sarnic Dirchi