Oooh this is a fun one. I’ve anyways dealt with cattywampus tanks, it just comes with the job. But a few clients will what’s stand out to me.

I remember a client coming into the store I worked in, telling me he had a “large” tank (after this I never made the same mistake again), and asking me for a good starter fish that could cycle the tank, get large, and grow out for the remainder of its life. But he wanted the fish to have “character” … Whatever that means. About 30 minutes later after walking the customer through all of his options, and describing how the nitrogen cycle works, he decided to buy a baby Oscar. We even named it! Mcnuggets. I expected, like with any new tank, a subtle amount of ammonia for the first few weeks. But a single Oscar in a “Large” tank is perfectly fine. So when the customer came back with a water test the next week with ammonia off the scale… And let’s be clear, the Api ammonia test kit goes from yellow being 0 ammonia, to green being 5.0ppm of ammonia. And 0.25 ammonia will kill fish. So again when i tested his water and the ammonia came out BLUE i knew something was up. After telling him to 75% water change, dose beneficial bacteria daily, and take home a bacteria culture pad. Each week he would come in, ask for more fish, and be denied since he always had 5+ppm of ammonia. After about a month of being denied he disappeared.

 

Eventually about a year later i was moved from the sales floor to the maintenance crew , so lucky me when I got a call one day to a 100 gallon tank in dire need of a service. The day I arrived and saw that customers face at his apartment door was pretty awkward. But what was even worse was the when i saw Mcnuggets. That 2 inch Oscar from a year,was not in a large tank, but instead in a 10 gallon. And Mcnuggets GREW. And it gets worse! Let me try to describe the scene. As you walk to the tank you see a 2 inch gravel bed… Wait, that’s not gravel…. No no, that’s extra large cichlid pellets. After closer inspection you see that it’s actually a bare bottom tank, with a tetra whisper filter. But the cartridge in the filter was never changed. The water is almost black, the smell is as if Wendy Williams accidentally dropped her wig in a cauldron of ranch dressing, then microwaved it and left it in the sun…. For 6 months.

 

And let’s not forget poor Mcnuggets. Poor… Poor Mcnuggets. Completely vertical, ribs showing, not from being skinny, but from a bacterial infection literally eating his flesh away. There was no way of saving him, I was actually surprised he lasted that long. After telling the customer there’s no chance Mcnuggets would survive the cleaning, the customer decided he didn’t want the tank cleaned. To this day I don’t know what happened to Mcnuggets. I hope he died, as awful as that sounds 🙁