“Maaaannnn, I really feel for you with those cats,” "Patty" said with a wrinkled Oakie accent. I smiled. This one-of-a-kind woman (who has been stalking her husband online during their separation) more than makes up for the fact that Neon Bangs Woman has decided to go copper for the rest of her life and fails to entertain me anymore except when she’s dragging a Dora the Explorer backpack on wheels out to the parking lot.

“They’re cute, just getting kinda large,” I commented lightly before Patty started speaking again(clasping the edge of the table and thrusting her shoulders forward)and described a woman on the fourth floor of our building. Her intensity is jolting.

“You know, I says to her, you gotta get rid of that cat! She has a cat that shits in her bed, you know,” she said as if I should already know this. My lunch caught in my throat.

“What?!”

“Yeah it has some sorta disease..or something wrong with it…and it shits everywhere--- I tell you what, if I was rollin’ around in cat shit at night I would definitely put my cat down. It's just what you gotta do! But she won’t put it to sleep!”

If my mouth hadn’t been full my jaw would have fallen on to the table.

Patty is startlingly similar to someone in a perpetual state of mania. She arrives at work at 6:30 am. She works out constantly. She has another part-time job just for fun. She works overtime. She has horses. Her speech is urgent and often uninterrupted and lacks a general “filter” for most subjects--- like her husband’s double hernia. So it's either mania, kick-bootay vitamins, or she's on speed. I wouldn't really rule out any of those.

“So did she take it to a vet?” I asked.

“No! She took it to the cat communicator and I’ll tell you what--that cat communicator told her the cat’s fine and I says, I don’t care what a cat communicator says, I says, I wouldn’t put up with that for five seconds,”

“What the heck is a cat communicator?” I asked.

“A pet psychic, you know.”

My three male co-workers were coughing on their food at this point— eyes watering to keep from spewing across the table—but trying to remain discrete since Patty clearly didn’t think the pet communicator was as odd as the woman who slept with cat crap in her bed.

“Seriously? She goes to a pet psychic?”

“Oh all the time! She had one cat that got lost and she went to the cat communicator and the cat communicator told her it was dead and she should just give up lookin’ for it, and do you know what happened two days later? The pet shelter called her sayin’ they found her cat. I mean if that doesn’t tell you what these cat communicators are all about I don’t know what will…” I clenched my abs to keep from laughing all over the table.

“But you know my husband’s kid? The one that’s a kleptomaniac? Well my husband is lockin’ him outta certain rooms now and I says to him— wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I right that your kid is a total stealing psycho? But gosh that double hernia is just killin’ him right now." She turned to my co-worker, "Joe". "Joe you ever had one of those?”

Just another lady of the Lot…..