A mouse in my house

Well, it's not quite my house, but I spend more time at my office (which happens to be an old farm house from the Civil War days)than anywhere else. Recently, the product management group moved into a new office space in the building. It's quaint, modern and probably the best spot in the whole building. We even have a great stereo system in the room complete with large audio cabinets. Great storage space, right? It depends what you are storing.

One fine morning I decided to grab some of my instant oatmeal out of the cabinet. What I found was a completely eaten granola bar and holes in the bags of pretzels, oatmeal,and hot cocoa. We had a visitor! It's not a secret that this old farmhouse had mice. It just never occurred to us that they would find their way into the audio cabinet.

The next day we set a trap with peanut butter to catch the little rodent. We set the trap at 830am and went about our days. By 330pm we had completely forgotten that a trap had been set. One of my co-workers and I were having a meeting and suddenly we heard a loud 'CRACK!'. We both realized that the mouse had been caught. Too scared to look we tracked down our IT guy and made him check it out. He confirmed that a mouse was dead and closed the cabinet. We emailed maintenance to take care of the guy and went about our meeting.

A few moments later we were startled by 2 new noises. We heard 'Eeeeek!' and then another loud 'CRACK'. The mouse was not dead! At this point we kind of squealed in fright (yep, two chicks and a mouse) and a few co-workers came running in. One of our co-workers was kind enough to put on some Safety Goggles and grab some giant kitchen tongs to dispose of the little guy. He even put the mouse out of it's misery and sent it to an icy grave. The bonus = He cleaned the blood out of the audio cabinet! Our hero!

We haven't seen a visitor in awhile now. I'm guessing the little mouse grapevine sent word of what happens when you sneak into the audio cabinet. The food has been moved to a more secure location that the mice can't get to also.

This is not the only animal story at Saris that I have. Last summer, we had a bat fly through our area. One of the engineers captured him in a plastic bin. What a creepy little thing. But that's another story for another day....