Punk'd

It's not even April Fools and already I think [Львица] and I have already encountered our first practical joke of the season.

I had just come back to the apartment on Tuesday after class to make lunch and to finish up a paper I had to write when someone knocked on the door. I opened it find our tenant from 304 (who we've not exactly had the easiest time with) looking very upset. She then proceeded to explain to me that she had been gone over spring break and, after she'd returned, noticed that these pod-like things that she thought might be insects had appeared on the walls of her kitchen-dining room area. I decided to to take a look.

I had never seen anything like it in my life. Now, to frame this properly, it's been very warm in Minnesota, very very warm for March and I thought it very likely that something odd could have occurred given the sudden warm spell and that some creature could have found its way out of the walls. Upon examining them in the kitchen, which 304 had sealed off, afraid that some insects would escape and get all over her apartment, the only thing I could compare them to in my mind were prune-like growths sticking horizontally off of the wall. It seemed one was attached to a nail but I didn't think much of it at the time. I told 304 I'd Google search it and I'd get back to her.

They weren't beetle lava, they weren't chrysalis, they weren't spider egg sacs or fungi or anything that Google could even identify. Other than prunes. I told [Львица] about it and, later that evening when 304 wasn't there, we returned to examine them ourselves with a more perceptive eye. Gingerly, [Львица] pried one off the wall, a plastic bag over her hand, and we found it was also on a nail. We removed eight of these things, all of them on nails, and took them in a bag into our apartment.

The "pods" on the wall, as taken by [Львица]

My hand holding up a small key to compare size to the "pod"

We began really seriously wondering if the "pods" were large raisins or some kind of prune. It's what they looked like most and some were even kind of greenish, like dried raisins sometimes are. So, after I failed to find any way of scientifically testing them in our kitchen, we sliced one open, looked at it, sniffed it, and decided that it must be a raisin (or some unknown alien life form; highly unlikely at this point). Knowing 304 has a friend in the building, we wondered if it was a practical joke (as 304 told me she is dreadfully terrified of insects. And that she'd asked her friend from apartment 2 i for our phone numbers (as she'd lost her phone earlier in the semester and apparently didn't have either building manager's number re-added) but her friend had never gotten back to her).

What do I think? I'm not detective (as much as I wish I was) but I presume that 2 did this as a practical joke and 304 really flipped out and got us involved. But we haven't heard back from 304. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if those "pods" reappear.

Seriously, people. This was half of my Tuesday. I have the weirdest job in the world.