regular readers (people who read my newsletter a week ago) will recall that the last you heard from me, i was experiencing a rodent crisis (there was a mouse in my apartment). the traps we set didn’t help — the mice ate the peanut butter off of them, which is in equal measures horrifying and honestly kind of impressive — and last tuesday i came home from the office, put down my bag, threw my laptop on the couch, and saw three mice skitter across my living room floor. i then did what any reasonable, anxious, unmedicated person would do. i stood on top of my coffee table and screamed, and kind of floor-is-lava’d myself to my bedroom and sat on my bed with my feet sticking straight out (so as to not be touched by an errant mouse, i reasoned) and scream-cried on the phone to chase and packed a bag and went right over to his apartment. as far as i was concerned, the mice could have my apartment! i was out!!!
the next day the exterminator my landlord hired came over. he was in my apartment for all of fifteen minutes. he sealed up some holes with foam (no steel wool, no copper mesh) and told me i was “all good” and that the poison could take 24 hours to hit the mice. reader, i was not all good. in fact, i was down bad worse than i knew. on thursday, i saw the mice again, which was expected, because mice do not die as soon as you exterminate them. on friday, i continued to see the mice. i walked over to my landlord’s office and was like: hey, your exterminator came two days ago. i am still seeing mice. is this normal? is there anything else to be done? and he called the exterminator on the phone in front of me. the exterminator yelled a lot and was very defensive of his pest controlmanship. he said “your tenants think i’m here to do magic!” and called me a princess. then he told the landlord that killing mice takes several days, which he claimed he also told me (false). i went home, armed with my landlord’s phone number because nobody answers the office line on the weekends when i suspected i would need his help again, and after seeing and hearing the mice all day friday i decided: i need to get out of here. i need to see neither human nor rodent for 12+ hours. and so i hoteltonighted a room in fidi for like a hundred bucks and packed up and hightailed it out of my apartment.
two hours later, at 9:30 pm, i realized i had a new instagram dm from my upstairs neighbor, informing me that she called 911 and my landlord because the unmistakable smell of gas was emanating from my apartment. immediately i knew what had to have happened: i hadn’t cooked in over a week (again: due to the mice) but the exterminator had moved my stove to dump cheap poison for the mice behind it. in doing so he must have turned on a burner, which stayed lit for two days. (i suppose there is a third and equally plausible scenario here, which is that a mouse lit the burner, perhaps in an attempt to cook a meal for himself.) personally i can’t think about this without wanting to die because on friday afternoon at 5:30 i lit a candle in my apartment and like, what if i had sent the entire building up in flames in doing so? anyway, the landlord let himself in and turned off the burner so fdny didn’t need to break down my door.
on saturday i bought my neighbor farmers market flowers and wrote her a card thanking her and apologizing profusely for unknowingly almost causing a building-wide incident the night before, and then i called my landlord and explained that the mouse problems were persisting, that i didn’t trust his exterminator, and that if it was okay with him i would like to hire my own exterminator to take care of the mice without causing a gas leak, someone i could trust who would do a good job for a reasonable price. he readily agreed. i sourced my own guy, who came first thing on monday. this exterminator looked like a tiktok star, was 20 years old, and told me he has been in the pest control industry for seven years. i tried not to imagine a 13 year old mouse eradicator. he spent a couple hours at my apartment, walking me through what he was doing, pointing out all the glaring places where my landlord’s exterminator had not sealed holes or not properly sealed them, and pointing out the one place he couldn’t seal himself—a spot in the living room where the radiator pipe runs through the wall. sealing this with foam would be a fire hazard, he said, and since it was an issue tied to the structural integrity of the building, i should get my landlord to do it. ok, no problem! i paid him. he told me he was one review on google or yelp away from getting a promotion, even if i left him a one-star review it would count and he would get promoted. i promised i would not be leaving him a one-star review but i would leave him his promotion-yielding review and he left and i wrote my second ever google review for him. i saw a couple very disoriented and, i assume, poisoned mice the next day, and have not seen any more since.
i emailed my therapist to keep her updated on the situation that had caused me to have a near-nervous breakdown.
i emailed my landlord recapping the exterminator appointment and telling him my exterminator alerted me to a structural integrity issue he was unable to resolve, a hole my landlord’s own exterminator missed. his response was less kind.
i emailed him back in a tone that i never use because i’m too scared to be firm even when i need to be.
to my surprise, he immediately apologized and sent a guy today. the guy absolutely didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t even attempt to fix the problem even as i walked him through it, but my exterminator is coming back next week, and when that happens i think we will be at Mouse Zero. this has been a most annoying process, made worse at basically every turn by people speaking to me like i’m a high-maintenance and unreasonable idiot for not wanting mice in my apartment. what have i learned from this experience? the same things every experience in living alone and being an autonomous adult in this world has taught me: nobody will advocate for you if you don’t advocate for yourself, having disposable income you can allocate to mouse extermination can literally buy peace of mind, you are your own best shot of ensuring that change happens, and occasionally telling your landlord that you know your rights might work in your favor.
now, at least, i have an exterminator, who i will add to my list of “guys”—a nutcracker guy, a deranged emoji holiday chain text guy, an avocado guy, a mice guy. already, i have offered his contact info to a friend who messaged me today with the unfortunate news: “i have mice now :(“
omg i laughed out loud at your therapist's response. Your cats are not doing their job. Stop giving them treats until they perform better.
I think the first mistake was going with peanut butter on the mousetrap instead of the more traditional cheese. Peanut butter just isn't very Gouda.