General Board

The Mouse Saga or The Law Office of Death

Posted By: Allene (216.175.126.62)
Date: Friday, 26 October 2001, at 9:44 p.m.

This really happened, I SWEAR! We had a mouse at work. Not a client mind you, but more of an uninvited resident. Bold little sucker too. He would actually dart around in the middle of the day, scaring me half to death. Now when I was a kid, I always thought women who got squeamish over mice were idiots, but as an adult (or at least a person who plays one on TV) I have come to understand the reaction. I am afraid they are going to eat my toes. See I hate shoes. I will were sandals, even in the rain sometimes if I am in denial about the rain. So this little sucker boldly dashing around my office was freaking my mind. I'm telling you, I saw him looking at my toes with hunger in his eyes.

Now, being a law office of long standing, and many, many clients, we have a LOT of paperwork. One room upstairs is literally filled with boxes of files (I think there are about 100 boxes in there.) And those are the old cases. Downstairs we have 8 huge filing cabinets and about another 20 boxes of current cases. So anyway, the point is that my boss (the attorney) is concerned about the mouse making mice and nests and so on in her files. Valid concern.

So she brings some mousetraps in. You know those kind that have the springs that break the little bugger's necks? She puts them around the office. The trap has this plastic bit that looks like cheese. Well maybe to an idiot it looks like cheese. It certainly didn’t look like cheese to the mouse, as he didn’t go near it. So put some real damn cheese in it you are thinking. We did. The mouse took the cheese and didn't get caught. So how about some peanut butter, you ask? Well, the cheese was actually risky enough. See we have ants too. They come out of the sink in the kitchen (the law office is an OLD Victorian house in North Berkeley. It is probably built on an anthill, as I have determined the entire earth is nothing but a gigantic anthill.) But I digress. We don't want the damn ants coming in full force to get the peanut butter, and believe me they would. I once left a peppermint candy, wrapped in cellophane, on my desk all night The next day I had ants all over my desk. So you get the picture.

Well one morning I come into work at the usual time (about 8:45 am). I set my purse down on my desk; I turn on the computer and monitor. I go and check the faxes. Then I walk into the kitchen, which is open to my office, since it is in what once was the dining room. There in the middle of the floor is this black plastic square about 4x4 inches with a little mouse stuck on it. I gasp. The trap wasn't there when I left the night before; therefore Kathryn (the boss) must have come in after hours and put it there. Then the mouse flails! Its back legs and tail are stuck in the gooey stuff on the trap, but the top part is resting on another mouse (now dead) so that part of it did not make contact with the gooey glue. I screamed. I'm sorry but it was flailing. I go to my desk and sit down, with my back to the mouse, and proceed to freak out. There is a mouse. It is alive. It is suffering. It is probably freaking out because it is stuck in the gooey glue and lying on its dead mate. This is too much. I am far too sensitive for this. I start to cry. Nay, I start to sob. I can't take this suffering (as I perceive it to be) going on behind my very back. How the hell am I supposed to work?

So I call my co-worker who is at home because she is always late. I ask her if she knows any men who will come over and deal with the mouse situation. She says she’ll call her stepfather to see if he will come over. She comes to work without the stepfather. I am still at my desk, trying to control myself. By this time I have called my boss on her cell phone and told her about it. She apologizes and says just put a box over it, and she will deal with it later. Put a box over it?? Like I can work with a mouse under a box in the kitchen suffering as it tries to free itself from the gooey glue and the horror of its dead mate? I think not!

I am realizing about this time, that I am going to have to do something about it. No one is going to come to my rescue, and there is no way in hell I can sit there all day and actually work and talk to people while pain and suffering is going on under my very nose. I don’t care if it is just a mouse. It is alive! It is warm blooded! It surely is terrified!

So, very bravely, I go into the kitchen. I get the dustpan and brush and manage to brush the whole thing, trap with dying and dead mouse lovers, into the pan. I carry it out to the back yard. I can’t just throw it into the garbage can and let it die. I wasn’t made that way. (I can hear some of you groaning now, oh what a sap! What an idiot! Well groan on if it gets you through the night.) Hilary, the young and perpetually late co-worker, brings me a butter knife from the kitchen at my request. I then proceed to try and scrape the little suffering mouse of the gooey black plastic. That glue is REALLY STICKY. The poor little mouse’s hindquarters are completely raw, because that glue has ripped all of the fur out. I manage to free his tiny little legs and butt from the trap. I try and shake him loose very close to the ground. He is grasping frantically for blades of grass, trying to drag himself off, tail still stuck in the glue. It ain’t happening folks. So, carefully as I can, I scrape his little tail off of the glue and plastic, trying my best not to injure him any further. It is hard; the glue is very strong. Finally, I get him off of the plastic bit, but his hindquarters and tail are still gooey, and worse, he is now stuck to the knife, and I still can’t shake him free. So Hilary runs back into the kitchen and gets another knife. I scrape him off of the first knife with the second knife. He is stuck to the second knife now. This goes back and forth for a while, until finally he is free.

Hilary and I watch him take off through the sparse grass. As he goes, like a mouse out of hell, bits of grass and leaves are getting stuck to his tail. I am hoping he will get dirt all over the glue and cease to be so sticky. I am hoping that eventually the glue will wear off. I am probably dreaming.

I went back into the office and called my boss again. I told her what we did and asked her if there were any more traps like this lying about the house. She says yes, there is one in her office, on the top of the bookshelves where she saw mouse poop. I ask if I can throw it away, and she, now realizing the cruelty of the trap, says yes. So I go haltingly into her office, afraid of what I might find. Please! I can’t take any more death and suffering today, I tell the Universe. I find the trap. It has performed its function. Only this time it is just a dead moth stuck to the glue. Fine. No problem. No central nervous system, no suffering, right? I throw the evil thing away. We had to throw the knives away too. We couldn’t get the glue off of them. I hope the mouse survives somehow. Hilary goes to check for it later in the day. She reports that she could not see a dead mouse anywhere. We decided it survived. It was easier to work that way.

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