The Marmot and Eddie Izzard

For a moment, it felt like I was in the middle of an Eddie Izzard comedy routine.

There I was at my desk, typing away. Barry Scott and I are the only ones in the trailer, everone else has taken the afternoon off or is elsewhere working away. It’s the first officially hot day of spring so we’ve got the doors propped open to catch the breeze.

I’m typing away. Out of the corner of my eye I see something in the hallway passing my cube. I look up. It’s a marmot. It nods to me, “Hello there, just passing through, don’t want to be a bother,” and it keeps on going. Down to the dead end hallway where the doors are shut and the copier lies and it can’t get out.

So Barry and I go down to the empty cubicles near the marmot and watch. Maybe we can let him into 613 and he’ll become AMWTP’s problem. He starts to come down the hallway again, then gets spooked. So we go back to our own cubicles – Barry offering the sound logic that if we ignore him, maybe he’ll work his way out.

He did. So we follow him to the vestibule. But the outside door is shut and he’s down the stairs right by the door. “How the hell are we going to get that door open,” Barry asks. Then Rick Farnsworth comes to the rescue. He opens the door from the outside, does a double take at the marmot panicking on the stairs, then holds the door open wide to let it out. End of marmot story.