Life of a Lab Rat

The Black Knight has been hard at party this last week, which accounts for his silence. We had outlaws over from foreign climes, dontcherknow, and far too much fun.

But it's pleasing to see that the Cage carries on in its inimitable way, with the usual angry students and requests for obscure reagents. Gratifyingly, however, at least one Rat's whiskers are twitchy enough to realize that I live for this stuff, and in his email to one of the Cage's lists attempts to forestall me by saying

P.S.: To the black knight: This is not a plan to take over the building / world

As it happens, I'm not so much concerned with Mr Kidd's missing post, as with the MYSTERIOUS MUG THIEF.

Back in May, this email did the rounds:

ok I want you to all stop what you are doing, we have an emergency, we have a missing mug, this is not just any mug this one belongs to a VIP and they would like it returned asap. I will include a detailed description so if you could all check the area of the building where you are it would be appreciated. (A general search of the building may have to follow if this email fails to deliver results).

A VIP? Ooh. The email continued,

The mug is large (very large) red in colour and has the Nescafe logo on it, it was last seen in the tea room from where it went missing, if you find this mug please return it to the tea room and no questions will be asked.

Serious stuff. I did switch off a little bit when I saw the 'N' word, and honestly thought no more of it for two weeks, until this appeared in our mailboxes:

I'm missing my mug! It disappeared after the amoeba trade display last week. It's a conical shape, white, with letters and words in a light brown color on the outside.

Another mug, mysteriously spirited away in the middle of the night, to who-knows-where for who-knows-what, and the intriguing possibility that we had a serial mugnapper in the Cage. (And yeah, saying what the 'letters and words' actually were might have helped).

I think the entire department must have gone to Safe Base Delta, because for over a month there were no further reports of mugs going missing, mysteriously or otherwise. We thought, if indeed we thought about the matter at all, that the mugs must have been returned to their owners (or at least the VIP's; there were no repercussions, and China, for example, was not invaded to secure future consistency of drinking utensil supply).

But it turns out that the mug thief, or thieves, had merely been biding their time and waiting for the heightened security alert to relax. Yesterday:

if you happen to see any of the tea room mugs/cups on your way around the building could you please drop them off in the kitchen, as we seem to be missing rather a lot

What is this? A ring of hardened international criminals, scouring the Cage for lonesome mugs? A Scientologist recruitment drive? What is going on? Will we ever find out?

Tune in next week for the next exciting episode of "Life of a Lab Rat" and find out! Or not.