We have rodents in our house.
I don’t mean those adorable little fluffy guinea pig creatures that talked to Eddie Murphy and ruined his career as a serious, credible actor in that movie that no one saw.
No, I mean RATS. Not the little black and white kind you buy at PetSmart, either. I’m talking about the kind of freakishly large, grey colored, beubonic plague carrying satan-creatures who wait till you’re asleep before crawling all over every conceivable living space you hold dear and generally consider to be relatively sanitary until you find rat feces scattered all over everywhere and your perfect world is shattered into a million pieces and nothing will ever be right with the universe again.
Or at least that’s what I imagine they look like.
I haven’t actually seen them.
I’ve only seen their poo. I saw it in the silverware drawer of my sister’s kitchen. My sister has launched an all out attack. She’s determined to rid the entire tri-city area of rats.
She’s a very ambitious woman.
Unfortunately, in her quest to exterminate them all she’s uncovered is more poo. (And, possibly, a decomposing body. At least that’s what it smells like. But that’s another post for another day because I’m lazy and all this typing is really quite ambitious of me anyways given my sloth-like tendencies.)
So my sister sent her husband to Home Depot for traps. He came home with these mysterious black disks that you “set” and then wait for the color to change indicating you’ve “caught” something. How it gets “caught” or what the actual manner of death might be is mysterious, as you can’t actually see inside the disk, leaving you free to imagine a peaceful, he-just-went-to-sleep-and-never-woke-up-or felt-so-much-as-even-a-cramp kind of death in which you, as the human angel-of-mercy, can talk yourself into thinking you’ve actually done the enormous satan-rat a favor.
After all, he was so sick anyways. I was just putting him out of his misery.
You’re welcome satan-rat.
It turns out it doesn’t matter anyways because apparently these rats have been around the block a time or two and aren’t falling for the black-disk, I’m-already-sick-so-thank-you-for-killing-me-because-I’m-terminally-ill-and-will-die-a-slow-and-painful-death-otherwise trick.
They must be wizened, inner-city rats.
So my sister called an exterminator
Turns out his method of extermination involved baiting a 3” x 6” strip of sticky tape with some sort of gooey, brown, tasty, rat-tempting treat. Unable to resist, the rat walks onto the sticky tape so as to eat the delicious brown goo, becomes stuck, is unable to free itself, and slowly starves to death...on the sticky tape.
Let me say that again.
Unable to resist, the rat walks onto the sticky tape so as to eat the delicious brown goo, becomes stuck, is unable to free itself and slowly starves to death...on the sticky tape.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t like rats. I’m not suggesting we all try to co-habitate—us and the rats, living peacefully together, sharing the same silverware drawer. I do not want to share my fork with their poo.
I just miss the days when all you had to do was put some cheese on a spring loaded trap and wait until *CRACK* their neck gets snapped in two and instantly they’re off to rat heaven.
I don’t understand why we had to resort to duct tape and brown goo. Seems like that might be a step backwards. Like to a time before we had an understanding of spring loaded technology...or the tempting nature of cheese.
Some things are best left simple.
Like microwaves. All I really need to do is re-heat pizza and occasionally defrost a burrito. All the other buttons are unnecessary and lead to confusion and despair.
To make matters worse, according to my brother-in-law, (who is responsible for “disposal” of those caught in the sticky tape-brown goo contraption) we’re only catching baby rats. Probably, says Phil the Exterminator, newly weaned infant rats, given their smallness.
Great.
It was one thing when imagining freakishly large, grey colored, beubonic plague carrying satan-creatures eating brown goo and getting stuck to duct tape. Then I could be like, “ha ha! CAUGHT YOU satan-creature!” But now I'm imagining tiny little infant rats.
Stuck. Scared. Confused.
Probably trying to figure out why their feet wont move. Wondering, "where is my mommy is and why isn’t she helping me?"
“WHERE IS MY MOMMY AND WHY WONT MY FEET MOVE!!!!???
Now we're just, like, giant, obnoxious, egocentric, murdering humans who think the silverware drawer exists exclusively for our own purposes and not for the toileting purposes of infant rats.
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