Sliced Bread 2: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

It takes me forty-five minutes every day, on the average, to feed all these damn fish. They're everywhere. It's a big office, and two of the walls are almost completely covered in fish tanks and filing cabinets. There are, in total, seventy-seven tanks. Carl's binder devotes more pages to the care and feeding of fish than it does to any other two topics put together.

And I don't know why they're here. Nobody else ever betrays even the slightest interest in them. Oh, Ingrid checks them out every now and then, but Greyghost and Cruickshank walk right past 'em. Nobody ever wonders how they're doing. Nobody keeps track of them. Nobody . . . how shall I say this . . . nobody acts like this is their fish collection.

And that's what it is. It's a collection. Someone went to a lot of time and trouble to get this whole setup together--was it Carl? If so, shouldn't he have, you know, taken it with him when he left?

I'm not a fish guy, and this experience isn't making me any more of one. I still don't know what most of them are (I recognize goldfish and angelfish and that's about it--the rest are all 'those blue ones in tank 32' and so on). I've got a schedule of how much food to put in each tank each day, and what kinds of food, and where to buy it, and how often to clean each tank, and on and on and on. I could probably go out and get a job in a pet store or something right now. I'm so sick of dealing with these things that I sometimes want to take a mallet to the tanks. I'd sell the whole set of 'em to a tuna cannery this second if I could get five bucks for them.

But then I think, they really do kind of spruce the place up a bit.