Right, so today the Orkin Guy shows up at my cubicle-that-is-not-a-cubicle in our temporary space, looking all bloodthirsty and eyeing my jugular and my nostrils and fingers.
Okay, I lie, he seemed actually too gentle to be someone who passes out painful demises by poison and other Apparati of the Pest Control Legions. He was rather Cliff Clavinish. But he inquired as to whether he could put down some sticky traps near my cubicle-that-is-not-a-cubicle. Because the mice have followed me to work. Okay, I lie again, they are a different mouse family, but I would still rather see them alive than dead.
One look at my face and he said, “I’ll put these someplace else.”
I froze. “I mean, sticky is sticky, right? Like, death sticky. As in, no peeling off without losing limbs and blood.” I began to whimper.
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I’ll…go somewhere else.”
I burst into tears the other week at work when I got there to find a dead mouse in my corner, looking like he had fallen asleep sweetly, under a spiderweb. Bursting into ragged sobs Is a Bad Thing to Do at the office, generally. Weeping at the sight of a dead mouse at the office is a category on its own. At least it cements my position as a “Creative.”
A very nice temp (not hired for this particular duty) removed him for me. I would have professed my love for her but I could not stop weeping over the tragic gray fellow.
We are moving to new headquarters soon but I sort of hope the live mice follow me and I can build them a habitrail thing under my Real Real Cubicle when I get it. If they promise to stay there and be quiet as mice and, you know, not stinky, or copulate-y or anything.
Because THAT would be a cool cubicle. That’s what a writer’s cubicle should look like. I’ll start dressing like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club and sing whispery Violent Femmes lyrics to them and chew on pencils and let them chew on pencils too. Who wants to be my cubicle mate?
Saw one of our home-based mice at home last night, scooting around the seltzer boxes and into the dining-room-that-is-not-a-dining-room, behind the striped couch that doesn’t belong or not belong in a dining-room-that-is-not-a-dining-room. He was gray with a cute white tuxedo, all sleek and soft and terribly cute. He was the George Clooney of mice. If he could talk he would have some charming wry understatement about the poor quality of crumbage on our countertops, and I would only love him more.
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Ragged sobs at the workplace. Feh. Do it all the time.
Except that my workplace is my home and my kids couldn’t care less.
I used to manage apts and cried every time…..some of us are more senstive souls than others!
During our mouse invasion though, I just wanted them GONE and happily told myself that our cats were just helping them move along in the kindest most loving way possible.
Oooo…I have a horrid story involving a mouse and a sticky trap. I wouldn’t allow a sticky trap near me either – you made the right call.
I came into my cube that is a real cube one day and as I sidled up to my keyboard my toe bumped something. I looked under the desk and someone had put a mouse trap right where I put my feet.
This is how crazy we are:
We caught many many mice babies in our house with Mr. Sticky traps and then we carried them to the field across the street and sprayed them frm the knees down with an olive oil mister (Thanks, Williams-Sonoma!), which released their teeny feets. If you come across any mice with extremely glossy coats and polished cuticle beds in Alrington, MA, tell them I said “yo.”
I would be your cubicle mate anytime. And while I would probably join you in sobbing at the fate of any dead, furry things…I also would be able to hold myself together long enough to dispose of them for you.
but you have to promise to let me have the pencil sharpener.
Aha! So your great American novel is going to be named … “Of Mice and Jenn”.
Squee!
My security code below is showing as OFUC. I kid you not.
I think mice are adorable and never could understand why people hated them so. And then I caught them nibbling on my wooden spoons and peeing in my Xmas ornaments. They got a lot less cute. When I found mouse poop on my silverware, they had to go. There;s nothing cute about a poop on your fork.
They need to cross whatever your personal threshold is between cute and disgusting before you’ll be cold-hearted enough to take action. The sticky traps are awful, though. The old-fashioned snappy ones are kinder, I think. I wouldn’t even consider poisoning them with all the other critters, human and dog, living in your house. Too risky.
Good luck. Be strong.
So, let me get this straight: there are mice in the office and at home. That’s a lot of rodents. I don’t want to say *we don’t seem to have many mice ’round here*, lest they jump in their little boats and start cooking for me. Although that would be nice.
(Oh, I’m thinking of french rats. Bummer.)
We have cut short the lives of many mice around here. If the furry little guys would just contain their poop to somewhere discreet, rather than in my kitchen or in the children’s toy bins, we could coexist peacefully. Alas.
Suddenly I feel like singing Corky and the Juice Pigs. Die, they must die, the penguins (or their distant cousins, the mice) must die….
Some suggestions.
1. There are rodent repellents. Buy one? I think it worked for us.
2. Traps, traps, traps. Covered traps.
3. Those high pitched noise things. They won’t go away from the whole house but will avoid those areas.
All holes plugged. All food super secured.
No sticky traps.
The first one is hard then you get immune to their little deaths. Especially after they invade your towels and give you lifelong microphobia and traumatic flashbacks.
Try to remember: It is us or them.
my friend’s husband used to have a place that was infested with mice. infested. they would put out a bucket of poison and find a bucket of dead mice the next day. mice are cute, sure, but not by the bucketload.
she made him move, by the way.
my code is UZYB and i totally wish it was OFUC because that one is way betterer.
“I’ll start dressing like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club and sing whispery Violent Femmes lyrics to them and chew on pencils and let them chew on pencils too. Who wants to be my cubicle mate?”
Oh, I do, I do!!!!! I’ll bring the black eyeliner and the pixie sticks.
I’ll trump your mice with say, 1-2 DOZEN large brown BATS living in my 100 year old un-insulated walls. I looked up bats on that wicca page…it wasn’t all bad, but they are outta here come spring.
Oh, and we do have mice in our attic. My cat has caught two. The first one we scooped up and set free, the second one, I clobbered with a broom. It didn’t make me happy to do that, but bats and mice? Jeez….I hate the effing country.
I haven’t had any personal experience with those sticky traps, but I’ve heard they are absolutely horrible. You definitely made the right call.
aww, i’m sorry if i offended you with my anti-mice comment yesterday. i forget how tender-hearted you are about all living creatures. i do not like mice, but mice traps creep me out even more. bleech. we had one mouse visitor last year and i had to research a humane way to get him outta here on account of the buddhist husband but there was nothing at rite aid that worked. luckily he just ran outta here of his own accord
My father, who was very no- nonsense when it came to such things as mice and hunting and flushing dead goldfish when I was growing up but has become decidedly more gentle since the granddaughters were born has always used this method because it is the most humane:
Take a large trashcan or laundry hamper with no lid and place some peanut butter on a cracker in the bottom somewhere along the mouse path. Add a small wooden ramp (usually some old scrap 2×4 we had laying around. The mice will walk up the ramp and jump in. Then they can’t get out because the walls are too high. But while they are waiting for you to come liberate them in a nice grassy spot outside away from the house, they can dine on some delicious high protein peanut butter while not pooping on your forks.
Finding their entrance holes is a necessity or they’ll never move on and just keep inviting their in-laws like in Christmas Vacation. The problem is, the holes only have to be something like an inch or so because mice have squishy ribcages so they can squeeze into impossibly small crevices.
Personally, I would have thrown the Orkin Man out of the office while sobbing and then have gotten fired for it all. Don’t even get me started about the sadness I have when the Terminex guy comes to the house and sprays for ants….
Could it be that you attract mice? Kind of like the Disney Snow White or Cinderella?
The only critters we manage to get are those feathery centipedes that roll across the floors at a surprisingly fast clip.
Assuming you stumble across a mouse that’s more Howard-Stern-gross than George-Clooney-sexy comes along, here are some supposed rodent repellents:
- Cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil
- Fresh peppermint, though it’ll dry out and get expensive to replace pretty quickly
- Bay leaves
- Bounce fabric sheets
- Cedar balls
- Cloves in little sachets (you can make ‘em with cheese cloth)
Apparently, you can take some combination of these items and place them around where the mice come in…and they’ll stay away. I’m told moth balls work, too, though I believe they’re toxic. Stuff the holes where they enter your house with steel wool, too.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the mice would sew cool clothes for Jenn and the girls by night and, like, clean the house by day?
I have to take exception to the idea of cats being a humane way to kill mice. Every cat I have known to kill mice has enjoyed literally PLAYING them to death. Nothing quick, nothing sweet. Just a long, horrible game of catch-and-release. If you can find a pacifist cat whose mere presence will frighten the mice away, then fine. Otherwise, do not employ a cat!
One time I went out to our shed and reached up on a shelf to pull down our Christmas creche. Inside the “barn” was a ton of torn up paper toweling and grass and stuff. I stuck my hand in to clean it out, and lo and behold – it was FULL of baby mice. I nearly threw it out the door!
Instead, I transferred it all as gently as I could to a shoebox. My parents said I was ridiculous. Hey – they weren’t inside the house! And I just couldn’t imagine the poor mama mouse coming back to her nest and finding it empty, babies gone. I was, by the way, 25 at the time.
I’ll join you.
I make my “mousetraps”. I take a bucket, put cushion-y material, such as egg shell mattress bedding, put food in it, and make a little ramp for them to get up. Then when they fall in, they land in a cloud, and can happily munch away.
Then I’ll go deposit them somewhere else, in a field with their friends that have joined them.
(yes, I know I’m probably redepositing the same animals over and over, but hey, it works for me.)
Geez you are so lucky. my mice never look like George Clooney…they’re more Danny DeVito.
Mice are actually quite sweet, or at least they can be if you have just one or two. Once they get out of control, you really have no choice but to intervene, whatever method you choose.
I raised several mice as a child, starting with a small, shiny black colored boy mouse named Ben. (No, he never grew big enough to attack me, like in the movie about the rat named Ben). Instead, he mated with a cute little white girl mouse and they quickly populated their cage with babies of various colors, and then more babies and more babies, until they (I kid you not) started attacking each other and literally eating one another’s limbs off. It wasn’t pretty.
I wasn’t sure what kind of birth control to give to Ben and his girlfriend. So we put them into their own separate cages, and my brother took the mob of young cannibal mice to the pet store and sold them as snake food. My heart sank at the thought of Ben’s children suffering such a fate, and the sight of Ben and his girl longing for each other from separate cages across the room. We did let them visit each other, but not without supervision!
When it comes to wild mice, sticky mouse traps are definitely something to stay away from. They are indeed the most cruel means of getting rid of mice, in my opinion. (Of course, when I consider feeding a mouse to a snake, I don’t know that that’s any better.)
Good luck with the mouse problem. I don’t envy you.
Bossy reads this and tries to sympathize, but all she can be is jealous that you have a workplace and a cubicle and a paycheck and stuff. Siiiiigh.
even though i would not be a fan of having rodents in my home i would be less thrilled to have them stuck to something. the very thought makes me cry. i have cried at work too many times to count. i have cemented my place as the crazy lactation nurse. i’m cool with that.
Well, if he’s the George Clooney of mice tell him to SPEAK UP AND QUIT MUMBLING ALREADY.
One time they were ‘trapping squirrels’ in the drop ceiling above me at work. I almost passed out from hearing one caught in a trap. And then the creepy squirrel-trapper guy went to retrieve the trap as I cowered and tried to avert my gaze. And then I saw it was a live trap. *sigh*
I guess he was going to spin him around a couple times and then drive him miles and miles away…
I thought I made up that kind of trap (the ramp leading up to a Rubbermaid bin. Only I had food bits attached with tape up the ramp, in case )! I became sorta famous around the neighborhood for catching our slippery hamster. I did it so often and so effectively that my son (the neglectful owner) was turning nonchalant when I’d proudly display my catch. So, I told him to fend for himself until he learned to regard me with awe and amazement.
I mean, honestly!
I have been living with the sonic plug ins for almost a year and they were fantastic until a few days ago. I woke up to fine little mice turds around my kitchen stove and on my dish rack. Instantly flash backs to the days before the sonic came flooding back to me, (I have no idea why they suddenly stopped working) My first response was to question if the mouse was deaf. Does he not understand that the noise is to keep him/her away for his own safety? Sadly I had to put the gate to heavens door down. (R.I.P. my little friend)
Apri