Welcome to the first in what will most likely be a one-part series called “Are you for real?”
Some stories are too crazy to make up, and this is one of them.
We have a mouse problem in the office. A couple of mice have been seen on desks, in the kitchen, in the hallways, in desk drawers, etc.
The mice are just smart enough to avoid the traps our building’s manager set for them, so a few of my coworkers still see mouse shit on their desks, in their drawers, and on their keyboards every once in a while. It’s a minor inconvenience for them I’m sure, and in an attempt to ward off more mice, our office instituted a “Do Not Eat At Your Desks Anymore” policy, as well as a “Do Not Leave Food Anywhere Anymore” policy. Both signs have been posted in our kitchen.
Still a minor inconvenience for most of us, I think. There is one coworker, however, who is sick of the mouse problem. So sick, in fact, that she came up with the perfect solution to get rid of the mice forever.
As a rat owner, she knows that rats eat mice. This was news to me (and probably the rest of the world), mostly because I thought they came from the same line of rodent ancestry. It sounds eerily similar to eating your third cousin at a family reunion, but perhaps rats are willing to cross lines that we normally aren’t. Maybe mice look like delicacies next to pieces of garbage and food scraps…although, anyone hungry enough to take used food off of plates at The Ugly Mug on St. Patrick’s Day may be willing to eat mice too. Maybe mice are just that good.
Anyway, to keep mice out of her home, my coworker takes a wet paper towel and wipes down the rats. She then takes the wet paper towel and wipes down her baseboards with the rat smell. The rat goo on the baseboards is like kryptonite to the mice, she says. They’ll be so scared of the rats that they’ll go to another floor in the building (preferably the second floor. I hate those guys).
She is SO sure of this that she brought her rat towels into the office and wiped down the entire area around her desk. Then, she took out more rat towels from her bag, wiped down the walls around her neighbor’s desk, as well as the baseboards and the door frame. No one around her said anything like, “Hey, stop. That’s creepy” or “seriously, what the hell are you doing?” Instead, her method was passed around the building like a cooking recipe.
So, while it looks like the mice are indeed avoiding their area, no one else seems to notice or care that the entire floor smells like rats. The fact that there some people over here who prefer the smell of rats to the sight of mice is unfathomable to me. I’ve only seen a mouse once during this entire debacle, and it was running AWAY from me, not towards my food. We can’t escape the rat smell and yet people are OK with this. Also, doesn’t it make sense that if rats pick up on a rat scent, they’d come upstairs to see what’s going on? It seems to me that there could be an upgrade from a mouse problem to a rat problem any day now. People are idiots. Freaky idiots.
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