Humor

A Clever Mouse Lives to Scare Another Day

But not before wreaking havoc with the boss

Introduction

When it comes to rodents, we all know where there’s one, there are more, and removing them can be a challenge especially when one is clever enough to escape capture.

Rodents in the office

While working at a temporary job near my home scanning documents for a small company, I became aware of a mouse problem throughout the building.

The employees knew they had to remove the rodents for health reasons, but also because the owner, Evan, a tall man in his 40s, muscular, and husky-voiced, freaked out, almost irrationally, whenever he saw one scurrying across the floor.

The problem was all the employees had food in or on their desks, which became a mouse smorgasbord every day.

Evan did not want to see any more of them, ever, he hated and feared them, and they made his skin crawl. He did not know where this fear of mice came from having raised white mice, snakes, gerbils, hamsters, and piranhas as a child himself.

Seeing them brazenly coming out during the day in his work environment, and knowing the population of mice was becoming out of control, he was starting to have nightmares about them crawling on him.

Even a dead one sent him running back to his office a few weeks earlier yelling to anyone within earshot, “Someone, get that dead ‘rat’ out of here. Get it out of my sight or heads are going to roll today!”

His ranting and high-pitched screaming like a little girl could be heard throughout the office until the mouse was removed.

Enough is enough

Tired of the situation, he asked John, one of his employees, to make a trip to the hardware store for traps and to stop for a jar of peanut butter. He also asked his office manager to send out a reminder to everyone to remove any food they were storing at their desks.

Everyone knew mice were getting into their food because they found it partially eaten with little teeth marks in it, but they kept bringing more.

When John came back from shopping with a handful of traps he immediately loaded them up with peanut butter and dispersed them strategically throughout the building before Evan could go ballistic again.

Throughout the day, traps could be heard going off from every direction, and voila, several mice were caught and removed by some of the employees, traps reset, and more mice were caught.

After a few hours, it was fairly quiet with no more loud cracks of mice being caught in the iron jaws of the traps. It seemed as if all the mice were caught and disposed of.

The coast was clear.

Evan could come out of his office now and go about the rest of his day without fear of running into one of those nasty little creatures. The rest of us crossed our fingers and hoped there were none left. We had enough drama for one day.

Is it safe to go back in the water?

Sometime later Evan walked into the kitchenette to warm up the coffee that had been sitting on his desk since morning when suddenly we heard him shrieking at the top of his lungs.

Everyone ran to the kitchen to find him leaning against the wall opposite the microwave with his coffee cup still in his shaky hand screaming, “Get it out of here! Get it out of here!” his finger pointing toward the microwave.

There it was — a mouse that had cleverly avoided all the traps — who now gave us a quick fearless glance before he happily continued eating peanut butter from the spoon that John had left out uncleaned on top of the microwave from earlier in the day.

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