Back to the office

For the better part of a year, I have avoided my campus office like the plague. I cleared out last June and did my level best to stay away through family leave and then a sabbatical. I can't point to any one thing fueling my desire to stay away and to work from home. The baby was a huge part of it, course, but there were other reasons.

Rats, for instance.

My office is located in the attic of a building on the historic register (or so I'm told). It is old and dusty. In the recent past it was infested with rats the size of small house cats. Oh yes, office vermin! Such an authentic link to the past! We should put it on the campus tour. I was so afraid of my rodent invaders that I would knock on my door before entering the office so they could scamper back to their hiding places in the walls. Getting rid of them was a comedy in three acts. First, the maintenance guys brought traps over and baited these with peanut butter. In the mornings before I would enter, I would send someone else into the office to check the traps. There were never any bodies to dispose of. Instead, all the peanut butter had been licked off and there were often little peanut butter rat tracks back to the bank of cabinets lining my office. One maintenance guy was so certain that the traps were malfunctioning that he tested one. With his finger. The traps were in perfect condition. His finger, alas, was not. This incident confirmed my fear that the rats were, in fact, smarter than people. When it became apparent that traps wouldn't work, the college contracted with an outside exterminator who baited the office with rat poison. The rats ate the rat poison, but it did not kill them. I suspect this is because they were super rats for whom rat poison was the equivalent of Popeye's spinach. What finally worked was putting a new roof on the building. Apparently there were holes under the slate of the old roof which provided an on-ramp for the rat super highway that ran through my office.

All this is to say that a healthy and sustained fear of rats is one reason I stayed away. You never know when they'll be back.