Mrs. Frisby

We have a mouse at the store. She's been there a while, apparently, but the exterminator just came last week to put out a fresh batch of sticky traps (similar to flypaper) to catch it. When I first heard about it, I went all PETA on the receiving manager, Gerald: "You guys aren't going to hurt it, are you? You'll set it free after you catch it, right?" But he just laughed at me.

I have a rep at work for being a bleeding-heart animal lover - as it stands, I am the only vegetarian there, and I was ridiculed mercilessly for saving a black widow spider and releasing it outside, only to learn later that someone else had seen it and stepped on it. So, they knew I would be all gung-ho for saving the mouse. Until I walked into my office last week and discovered that it had eaten some of the chocolate sitting in a candy dish on my desk.

This meant war. You don't mess with a girl's chocolate.

I decided to use it as bait. I got one of the sticky traps from Gerald, and we put it in my visual room with some of the chocolate in the center. If it wanted the chocolate, it would have to step on the trap, where it would be stuck until we could dispose of it (humanely). Well, it seemed like a good idea...until I walked in this morning and saw that the mouse had moved one piece of chocolate so that it formed a bridge to the other piece, so that it wouldn't need to step on the sticky part of the trap to get to it! I have no idea how the mouse accomplished this, but I do know that I have a whole new respect for it. I named it Mrs. Frisby (after the Secret of NIMH) and have decided that we'll probably never catch her, because she seems way too smart.