Mighty Mouse

My office smelled pretty bad yesterday. It had that oh so familiar dead animal in the vent smell. I was busy yesterday, so I just had to live with it. I sat in the office most of the day working, inhaling the gag inducing smell of death. At about 4:00 in the afternoon, I was happy to get out of the office to do some electrical work. While out, my brain automatically blocked out the horrible stink that existed back at the office.

Upon returning near midnight, I was quickly reminded. The overwhelming aroma of rotting animal flesh nearly knocked me over as I entered the door. This must be dealt with!

The search for the smell immediately led me to the side of the room by the window. I began digging through boxes of parts and other random junk, moved two computers out, and still, no carcass. I used my nose after pulling all of it out, and the smell seemed to be higher, as there was no smell near the floor. I found this odd, but checked in the folds of the curtain, expecting to see something fall out at any moment. No luck. I smelled the curtain... that wasn't it.

I began to get very aggravated when my nose happened past the running window fan. My eyes began to water. It couldn't be behind the fan, could it? I began to cut the fan loose from its mounting to look behind it when I looked down into the fan and saw the culprit in the fan. There was a very fat dead mouse in the fan!

This raised one burning question: how the hell did it get in there? This fan has plastic grating, spaced 1/2 inch vertically. When stretched, that spacing can become 3/4 inch at the peaks of the stretched portions. This mouse was over 1.5 inches in diameter, and that's after a day of rotting! There were no broken grates, meaning the mouse had to have pushed his fat bottom through a tiny hole, working so valiantly... so he could have his head bashed in by a spinning blade. Stupid mouse.

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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute