oh rats.

So my house has rats. Or had, depending on how you look at it.
I have never had this problem before. I have always had cats. Rats do not like to live in a house with ferocious felines who are at least 4 times their size. My roommate, however, does not like cats. She claims to be allergic, but that is basically the key word she uses for anything she doesn't like. Case in point--she is also "allergic" to cheese. But not mozzerella.
So barring the cat option, we tried traps. Turns out these are very smart rats, who were able to eat the food out of the traps without setting them off. We asked the rats how they managed this, and they told us they graduated from WM class of '93. Only one rat, Bubba, met his demise in a trap. He went to UVA.
So we decided to play dirty. We put out poison--not the kind that makes the rats thirsty, the kind that makes them bleed internally. This poison is disguised as rat candy, and even WM alum rats can't resist it. It would be like if someone offered all of us free beer which was secretly laced with arsenic. So the rats ate all the poison--hooray!
But then things got ugly.
On Friday a dying rat crawled into our living room and jumped into my roommate Guapo's backpack. For real. (Imagine me standing on top of the coffee table and shrieking for five minutes straight.) Erika and I were of course too freaked out and sissy to do anything about this than to cover the backpack with a laundry basket and put a whole bunch of heavy books on top. Then Guapo got home and had to deal with it. Apparently the rat bled on all his stuff, including some money which we now call "dirty rat money." We might give it to our landlord who refused to help us with this whole rat problem.
A couple other rats came out to die, but then we noticed this disgusting smell emanating from under our kitchen sink. Every time I use the sink I am afraid a rat zombie is going to lurch out at me. This sounds like a problem for....THE RAT MAN! (dadadadadadadadadadadadadaa...RATMAN!!!)
The Rat Man is a guy with an exceptional sense of smell who will wander around your house snifffing at things and thereby pinpoint the location of any rat carcasses lurking behind your walls. He then cuts a hole in the wall, removes the carcass, and repairs the wall. My hero. I am eagerly awaiting his arrival today. Maybe he will be young and attractive, but down on his luck, and stumble into my room to find me typing away with a Biore pore strip affixed to my nose. We will be immediately attracted to one another, but the fact that he works in rat carcass disposal will get in the way, and we will only manage to get together after several interventions by my intelligently quirky, calculatingly beautiful and silently overweight pals.
By the way, I can't be friends with any of you anymore.