Perky and Alive

Yesterday, I was working away from my office in another building a few blocks away. I knew that I would be gone before I left work on Friday so I left a note asking my officemate Dave if he would feed my Betta fish when he got in to work on Monday. I was a little concerned about my fish since he seemed a little sluggish on Friday after I changed his water. As he had always been a healthy fish with a vigorous appetite, I attributed his sluggishness to the fact he had not slept well since workmen had changed the lighting in our cubicle earlier in the week, thereby increasing the brightness in his bowl threefold (Bettas need darkness to sleep since they have no eyelids). To help him sleep better, I shaded his bowl with some file folders before I left Friday night.
When I got a free moment yesterday, I called Dave to ask if he had completed a work task and also if he had fed the fish as I asked.
"Sure", Dave said, "I gave him his food first thing. He came right up to the top of the bowl -he was very 'perky', seemed real active."
"Great, because he was not so active on Friday, in fact I was a little worried that he wasn't doing so well," I responded hopefully.
"No, he's fine, he's swimming all around," he reassured me.
Several hours later, I returned to my office to find the "perky one" nose down and dead. As I fished him out of the bowl to send him to the porcelain fish mortuary for his "burial at sea", I noticed that, not only was he dead, but that he was in full rigor. After I came back from the restroom, I ran into another of my co-workers and told told him about Dave's pronouncement of the fish's vigor versus the reality of the dead fish that I had just flushed.
"You'll have to tell Dave how 'perky' and 'alive' he is; let's see if he takes that as a good sign based on how his definition of those terms turns out," he offered.
So this morning, I had to razz Dave about it -"feeling perky yet, Dave?"
We laughed all morning.