tubes of terror...

T-Minus: 8 days...
_

Location: University of Otago Aquarium

Objective: Job

_

time is now definitely running out! i've got just over a week to meet these stupid government criteria... i need to get this job thing in the hat people of the web wide world or it's the end of the game as far as i'm concerned! (though why i need a job in a hat doesn't make much sense if you ask me)

as of such i've made my way all the way out of town to the aquarium to try and get the job listed in the news paper...

now the aquarium is pretty out of town. fortunately NOT as far as the albatrosses or pilot's beach so i could get out here by bus if i needed to.

off the bat have to say it is a kinda intense looking place. much more complexy and hardcore then the vancouver aquarium looked. if i was going to be a tour guide here i might just have to take up being a spy again to work in a place that looked this much like it was out of a peter bond movie. wonder if there's a correlation between spies and aquariums?

walking in the front door this place continued to baffle me. this time by defying what i understood an aquarium to be. i thought they were places with glass squares full of water and fish...

this place had glass cylinders instead!

very sci-fiy. i was getting kinda creeped out thinking about all the various scary movies that tended to start with things in big glass cylinders...

fortunately interrupting this tangent was a convenient snack hanging from the roof. i never say no to a free meal. so this hit the spot...

wait a second. in hindsight this probably wasn't the best move for me to make. considering i wanted a job... "uh yeah i kinda ate one of your displays" never goes over well at these sorts of places...

after this rather nice though unfortunate lunch i decided it was time to get crackalacking... that is case the joint for info, and then blow the staff away with my rather large knowledge of their displays and animals.

first up was a skeleton. kinda of my forte after all those years at the tyrrell! though i'd never seen this particular kind before. the skull looked kinda familiar though...

it was a dolphin... i'd seen a prehistoric ancestor of this poor little guy just yesterday in my job hunt at the university campus (the university should think about relocating it's aquarium closer to that location!). okay well i knew a bit about dolphins. so this job was looking promising...

then things went kinda unpredictably... approaching a particularly scary glass tube labelled "sea horses" i was a little wigged out. the contents of this tube definitely looked like it could be dangerous or conceal something dangerous.

when i got up close nothing moved for a while... i thought maybe i was imagining things, and making up things to be scared of...

then suddenly these little tendril things reached out from the sea weed looking stuff and touched the glass... it was just like a sci-fi movie!!! i didn't want sea weed to attach to my face and lay it's eggs in my brain (especially since it could lay even more in my relatively empty skull)

now that i've looked up what a sea horse is on the innerweb i have to say this may not have been the wisest course of action i could have taken. in fact i might venture to suggest this was actually kinda dumb. those "tendrils" weren't from the scary mass of kelp, but rather were just tiny sea horses...

though i kinda overracted to this none real threat what i saw next was actually a cause for concern!

i ran head long into a colossal squid!!!

i'm so not joking people of the inner web!!! just look at the photo!

these are things not to be trifled with... they have claws in their tentacles the size of my head! (granted i'm a tiny tyrannosaur. if i were full grown then maybe it'd have been a match worth watching... but if wishes were horses... uh i'd be scared of them in their glass tube?)

needless to say i cheesed it out of there!

only to get trapped by a different hazard!

now who ever thought putting a fish net in the middle of an aquarium as being friendly to visitors is beyond me! i mean just think of the hazard to children. or for that matter those trying to escape the colossal squid on display!

it was here trapped in the net that i met my undoing at the aquarium people of the web wide world...

it wasn't until they were closing the place for the evening that i was discovered by a staff member and rescued... but i was a little embarrassed. OKAY really embarrassed! and couldn't force myself to ask about the job...

i mean i did just get caught in a net ALL day! not exactly someone you want leading tours around your nice (and scary) aquarium...

this is NOT good people of the innerweb! very NOT good...

i have only ONE more chance at getting a job. if i fail it's no more new zealand for me...