Thursday, February 12, 2009

party to murder


Two days ago when I reached for the Ghirardelli chocolate bar I had left on my office desk I discovered that someone else had been tasting it.  Without my permission.  And that someone had very small, sharp teeth.

I was disgusted.  A mouse, at work, in my office.  Eating my chocolate, no less.  Eating the GOOD chocolate and ignoring the M&Ms!

When I shared the information I was told that I was not the first to report a problem with a chocolate-loving mouse.  Apparently the receptionists had had their secret chocolate stash raided my little thieves with sharp teeth only a few weeks before.  So a trap was set in my office in what was considered to be a "likely" place to catch it.

This morning I walked into my office, and in the semi-dark there was a fat brown mouse in a paper-tray, staring at me.  We stared at each other while I picked up the phone and called the lunchroom, where I had seen the maintenance guy only a few minutes before.  We stared at each other while I waited for Bill.  It got bored staring, and ran around the tray trying to decide if it should run or try to hang on to the M&M it was eating in the paper tray.  It decided to leave.

When Bill arrived he was holding a bag containing a dead mouse he'd just pulled from trap in the mechanical room downstairs, and we watched as the critter ran this way and that, and hid under and behind file cabinets, my foot rest, whatever it could find.  It was fast.  I checked the trap under the bookshelf and found that the peanut butter was gone and the trap hadn't been set off, so I whacked it with the broom and pulled it out to be reset, and Bill left to get a second trap and bait them both.  I was invited to bring in the kittens and work with them in my office today with the door closed.  I was seriously considering it, and was trying to figure out how to get them here, since I had just dropped off Isis and Chaka at the vet in the cat carriers only twenty minutes before.

Then my Brian, the other chemist, came in, and we watched the thing come out and stare at us again.  So I grabbed the broom and he grabbed my empty trash can. I scared it out from behind the file cabinet and Brian popped the trash can over it.

Now what?

Bill came back, set the new traps, and he and I slid cardboard under the can so we could flip it over and get it out.  Bill carried it out to the loading dock, and gathered the bin liner, keeping the mouse in the bottom.  I pulled off the cardboard, and he swung the bag and whacked the mouse on the loading dock.  Three times.  Ick.

The dead mouse was tied into the bin liner and tossed in the dumpster.

There.  I confess.  I helped to kill a living creature.

A creature that stole my chocolate.

My good chocolate.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

awe, it sucks to watch something die, even if it is a mouse who has stolen your chocolate, event the good kind.

Anonymous said...

Oh come now, admit it - it felt good, even for a moment, to touch base with your cro-magnon roots, didn't it? ROFL!!

Alwen said...

Mouse story time!

When I first became a stay at home mom after my job went poof, I opened the silverware drawer one morning to find little mouse leavings.

In kids' books, mice are always cute and funny. In my spoon drawer they are emphatically NOT.

I boiled everything that could be boiled and bleached everything else, including the inside of the drawer.

And then I bought traps. (Safeset mouse trap, got 'em at Menards.) I'm sorry for the bad mouse karma I'm accumulating, but I am not having mouse pee and mouse poop in the silverware!

(The verification is "ovened", but I have never ovened a mouse.)