My current office, approximately number 17 in the 21 years I’ve been with my company, is wonderful. It sits in a corner on the top floor of our headquarters, sheltered by trees on one side and provides a sweeping panorama of the surrounding countryside. Granted, the countryside consists of a gravel quarry, the Pennsylvania turnpike, and the roofs of other buildings, but if I squint I can make out the dome of a local university perched on a distant hill. It has an attached conference room with a wall (an entire wall!) made up of whiteboard material so I can write and draw on it to my heart’s content. It is spacious and well lit, with my own personal thermostat (the single best feature of any office).

There is just one tiny problem, a miniscule complaint in the face of all this magnificence. In the springtime, which is fast approaching (crocuses are blooming already, preceding the snowdrops this year), it is infiltrated by a seven nation army of – FLIES! Although Alfred Hitchcock scared (and scarred) audiences with his masterful representation of evil birds, he should have focused on the ability of flies to produce mental instability. First, there is the finding of the corpses. They litter the broad windowsill, their crispy bodies lying in stiff repose. Worse, there are the death throes. Every day one or more will buzz and drone against the windows, trying to escape so they can expire in the great outdoors. They are always just out of reach, high enough behind the blinds that I cannot get to them even with a rolled up newspaper. I also fear my coworkers will breeze past my office and see me kneeling on the windowsill, swearing at the infestation of Musca domestica who hum their insanity-producing tune even in my sleep.

No one knows how they enter the building. Is this an inside job? Is there a Jeff Goldblum-like proto-fly who herds them in at night, leaving them tasty treats to feast upon? The exterminators just shake their heads and tell us that it would require the insecticide equivalent of napalm to rid the building of them.

Too bad I can’t just import one of the turkey buzzards who swoop outside my office (and now appear to be nesting nearby) and see if they could provide some environmentally friendly pest control. But then again, the tradeoff of buzzard poop for dead flies doesn’t seem quite right.