A while back, I was severely underemployed and cleaning for around 18-20 hours a week at a small veterinary hospital. Aside from being broke, this was an okay job because I got to be alone and talk to the resident cat (and myself, of course) for several hours a week, as I was often the last person there, cleaning, etc. It wasn't a large building, so it wasn't grueling by any means. My boss was very pleasant (aside from being my boss), my coworkers were mostly cool, plenty of animals I got to interact with regularly. I was there for just under a year, and the things I remember best are the bugs I happened to spot just a couple of times. One time I found a golden tortoise beetle hanging out on the x-ray monitor. People thought it was pretty, but nobody seemed thrilled. Another time I found an isopod giving birth right on the floor in the middle of the office area, a thing that I knew happened, but had never seen. I carefully scooped up the pod and as many of the babies as I could to place them outside. Everyone was polite and a couple people asked about what was happening, but nobody was excited the way I was. I found (and killed) spotted lanternfly nymphs, I saw my first ever grapevine beetle (indoors on clean laundry in the middle of Brooklyn of all places), many, many spiders in all sorts of obscure little crevices, a couple of house centipedes that I was very careful not to tell anyone about; all sorts of fun, albeit mundane things. But there was one absurd little creature I could never forget about. For going on three years this one fly has kept bothering me because he was just so... so fucking flat. Like so comically flat that at first glance I thought I was looking at a perfectly evenly smooshed into the desk fly. But there were no guts, no congealed juices, no evidence of a dead fly save for his stupid flat little body, which was very flat. I was alone in the building and could not help but notice out loud how silly and flat the fly was. This of course, led to me being curious as to why he was shaped That Way. After a couple of years of wondering, I do believe I have it narrowed down to something in the Hippoboscidae family, and going exclusively off of body plan and location I would hazard to guess in the Pseudolynchia genus. I have no evidence of this except for some very bad, very blurry, very silly pictures of a very, very flat fly.
Boy that flat sure can fly
7/26/22