When Toilet Rats Attack

So I made some format changes to mockable while you guys were gone last week.  Basically, I’m hoping that we’ll have a daily guest mock, one from the “professional” mockers and then a quick one that I (metten) intend to write over my lunch hour whenever possible.  The idea is that it’s supposed to look like an email to a friend.  It will be more bloggy, but I am hoping that my natural penchant for mocking will come through and make it mockable enough.  Let me know if you have any strong feelings either way.

So I was sitting at work several years ago when the phone rang.  It was a lady that “just wanted to let me know” that a rat had crawled up the sewer lines and into her toilet.  She was an old farm widow that had moved to town when her husband died.  Apparently she thought nothing of it.  She went to use the restroom and when she lifted the lid she was greeted by your average Norway rat.  She apparently shrugged her shoulders, pulled up her granny panties, killed the rat with a bottle of shampoo or something, finished her bathroom business and took its body out with the trash.

As a guy who routinely points my bare ass and genitals toward that hole, I was a bit concerned.  I hung up the phone and called the fine people down at water pollution control.  They nonchalantly took down the address and told me that ‘d bait the sewers in the area and hung up.  It was as though I’d asked to borrow a cup of flour or something.  “Yeah, no big deal, we’ll go bait the sewers.”  It sounded like it happens all the time.  After I was done with the call, I called my wife at home and asked her if she’d ever heard of such a phenomenon.  She said, “eeew gross, no.”  We engaged in a bit of small talk, told her I’d be home for lunch in a couple of hours and hung up.

When I got home from lunch I found the Yellow Pages and a copy of Anna Karenina on top of the toilet seat.  I guess it freaked her out a little more than she’d indicated.  I never saw a rat come up through the toilet and I’d never seen a written account of it happening anywhere else.  Eventually, the wife took the books off the shitter and we forgot that it might even be possible.  The memory faded like the friends I had made at church camp (except that one girl that made out with me in the name of Jesus).

Now it’s New Year’s Eve 2009.  I had just driven 1,334 miles to Florida (which I am sure will be the topic of more than a few of these) and arrived at my mother’s Sarasota condo.  She had never received proper instruction in the ways of summerizeation (neither had I for that matter) and when I opened one of the toilets, I found one of them to be completely dry with a strange substance collecting near the drain. I put down the lid and went about my business, intending to scoop out and clean the toilet in the morning.

I once remember reading that the people who made Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had to speed up a recording of chickens to simulate the sound of hundreds of rats because “rats don’t make the sqeaking sounds that we imagine they do”.  Well George Lucas – you are mistaken.  Rats do, indeed, squeak.  They also make knawing and scratchy sounds while they’re having a rat-sex orgy in your mother’s toilet while you’re trying to sleep. When I finally got the nerve up to open the toilet the next morning, there were at least five of those little fuckers just wriggling away.

I’m out of time here and it’s a much longer story – but the short version is that the drains needed to be power snaked anyway so I waited until the snake was in the appropriate line and flushed those little bastards to the wastewater treatment plant.  At one point,  a series of snakes were occupying a series of traps and sewer lines, the little buggers had nowhere to go.  One of them actually came back up – this time I was waiting to flush his ass back down.  Long story short – it’s not usually something that you have to worry about, but there are very likely rats in your municipal sewer system.  I know, ’cause I got to meet them.