By Gio Arteaga
When I walked into Petco that afternoon, I wasn’t planning to buy anything alive. I just wanted a new fish tank decoration—maybe a fake castle, or one of those skulls with bubbles coming out of it. But then I saw him: a tan blur of fur ricocheting off the plastic walls of a hamster cage like a pinball with caffeine dependency.
His name tag read Nimble. The Petco employee—who looked about twelve—said, “He’s super active!”
Translation: He’s feral.
Still, despite ALL of the warnings, I took Nimble home. He was small, adorable, and had that innocent “please-don’t-leave-me” face that melts your common sense. Within one hour, I learned that his name wasn’t just cute marketing.
First night: I’m asleep, dreaming of passing my AP Calculus test (with Valerie Tu), when a mysterious scraping sound echoes from the corner of my room. I wake up to see Nimble unscrewing the lid of his cage like a tiny furry locksmith. I blink. He stares back. Then—boom—he’s gone.
Cue Operation Hamster Recovery. I spent two hours crawling under furniture, luring him out with a Cheerio trail like some deranged wildlife documentarian. He eventually reappeared on top of my desk, staring down at me with the smug confidence of a criminal mastermind.
By day three, he’d chewed through his plastic wheel, escaped again, and somehow managed to rewire my phone charger into a useless spaghetti knot. I renamed him Nimble the Menace.
The final straw came a week later when I found him inside my backpack, nestled in a pile of shredded homework. My teacher didn’t believe me when I said, “The hamster ate it.”
I returned to Petco the next morning, cage in hand, eyes hollow, sanity gone. The same twelve-year-old greeted me.
“How was Nimble?” he asked.
I looked him dead in the eye. “He’s super active!”
Moral of the story: never adopt a creature labeled as “energetic” by someone wearing a fish-shaped nametag.
Because trust me—it was an awful idea to keep it as a pet.