I can’t remember if I ever told the story. This is my office but there was remodeling next door and now people use the adjacent office. The walls are made out of whatever it is that transmits sound best. The people next door have a talking job. I have a thinking job and when they are talking I can’t think. I moved my desk into the main room.
That’s not the story. The story is that at the beginning of last month I cleaned out the vendor files in my old desk and I noticed some shredded paper along the top of some of the file folders. Sort of like a mouse would do.
Except why would there be a mouse on the 10th floor of a well-maintained office building?
I assumed the shredding must have happened with opening and closing the drawer and didn’t think about it again.
Last week I was in the office by myself (because all the strange stuff happens when I’m in the office by myself) and I was sitting at my old desk. I looked up and here was Mr. Brown Mouse trotting purposefully right at me.
He saw me, and if mice have facial expressions his was, uh oh, and he turned around and slipped into the utility room. The utility room is where the copier and supplies are.
After about thirty seconds of, huh, that’s different, I went and shut the utility room door and phoned building management and 5 minutes later I had 3 people from the maintenance staff in there seeing if they could catch it.
They didn’t find anything and arranged for pest control to return the next day and they left.
Of course I have all kinds of snacks in my office so I looked through it all – nothing looked like it had been snacked on. There were no signs of mice anywhere.
The next day I remembered I had a bag of chocolates in the drawer above the shredded paper drawer and I checked and sure enough, Mr. Mouse had been having a good time in that bag. I also have an extra pair of socks in my desk because my feet get cold and he’d done a number on those, too.
Traps have been set. Hopefully when I go in on Monday they will have captured him and taken him to live on a farm out by Scappoose.
I went down to get Christmas ornaments from our basement one year and found the bottom of it covered with brightly colored red and green mouse turds. Evidently they had been eating the candy canes. I didn’t sniff the turds, but I wonder if they smelled like peppermint?