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Dog Blog 11.0 – Return of the Wasps

By Jill Mathieu In Uncategorized, Workplace In case you’ve never visited YellowDog before, I’ll give you a brief description of our office (or you can just check out this photo of our sweet digs below!) To start, our office was built in the 1920s and is on the National Historic Registry. It was originally a house, but some renovations have been made to make it more appropriate for an office. However, it still manages to confuse newcomers several times a week. People will tentatively knock on the door (you don’t need to do that by the way, just barge on in!), and once they are in here, they usually think they’re in someone’s house. We can assure you that no one lives here (minus The Ghost, but that is a story for another post).

The next thing that happens when newcomers visit YDP is that they’ll most likely say, wow, this is a great office…because it doesn’t feel like an office! That part is true, and that’s why we like working here so much! No cubes and fluorescent lighting here – we each have our own areas that are decorated more house-like than office-like.

While we love working in this type of environment, there’s a couple things that get a little crazy around here. One is that we have no temperature regulation whatsoever. In the winter, it’s like the Bahamas upstairs, while everyone who works downstairs is wearing sweaters and gloves. The same actually goes for the summer – it’s blazing hot upstairs, but you’d probably think the downstairs people are dressed for summer in northern Canada.

The weirdest thing of all is my reason for writing this post, and the reason is swirling around my desk right this moment. Each summer, as soon as the temperatures go above 90 degrees, wasps start making our office their home. I think they are actually called mud daubers (I’m not too familiar with the wasp world, but I think that’s what it is). They usually just mind their own business and hang out by the windows, but sometimes they’ll venture out to our work areas. Certain employees used to scream like banshees when the wasps decided to come out and play, but now they are kind of just like our buzzy, annoying companions who come and go as they please.

Who knows why these wasps always come out in the summer (or why they come in here at all…or how they even get in here for that matter), but I guess it’s our signal that summer is here!

Our next goal is to take a picture of the little salamander (I think that’s what he is) with a neon blue tail that hangs around our back door. I’ve never seen one like that except for here at the office. But that’s not all – yesterday a deer was hanging out in the parking lot next to my car. I can’t wait to see what else comes out of the woods behind our office this summer!