I didn't always work in Cowville, Arizona (aka Chandler). I started my career at my company in an elderly facility in the heart of Scottsdale. Talk about your maze of hallways -- as the years went past and the company grew, they added on pieces of building. They built "temporary" buildings sometime during the Revolutionary War that eventually were swallowed by the growth of the main building. One of these was a large tin hut that had been on the back lot of the original building. It was connected and turned into offices and labs sometime during the Civil War, I believe.
Before they sold the business unit to another large company, this was the place where our little department had its offices. Inside the office bay area, you wouldn't know you were in a huge tin shed, unless a delivery truck rumbled past outside causing the walls to shake. Or when it rained and the water that didn't leak through the roof and into the room rattled like pellet shot above us.
At one time a field mouse decided our office bay was the coolest place on earth to live. We kept it cold, of course, in the summer. We had a sink, so it could get water. And we had a snack cabinet that we kept well-stocked with snacks.
The mouse declared these his personal stash of snacks.
One of my coworkers is a tiny but very feisty Vietnamese woman named Cindi. She stands about 4'10" and if she weighs over a hundred pounds soaking wet I'd be surprised. She cows the mightiest of men and has on more than one occasion reduced the manliest of male engineers to tears.
Cindi, as you may by now have foreseen, is terrified of mice.
We used to take our revenge on Cindi by leaving little mouse droppings near her computer. Or pretending we saw it skitter past.
Her screams were delightful to hear.
But I digress.
Gordon was one of the few engineers who had NOT been humiliated by Cindi, and he rather liked her, so he went out, purchased some humane traps, and set them.
He was delighted when one of them caught the mouse. Gordon, intrepid hero, carefully emptied the trap into a large plastic jar with holes punched into the top. His plan was to take the mouse out to the park a few miles up the road and release it.
He packed the mouse into the saddlebag on his motorcycle. It was 115 degrees outside. It took him about 15 minutes to get to the park. Imagine the mouse, terrified, in a bottle, sucking down exhaust fumes and sweltering in more than 115 degree darkness for that torturous ride to doom.
The mouse never got to run through the grass and get eaten by birds of prey or neighborhood cats.
Cindi was pissed off at Gordon for murdering the mouse. Go figure.
