This past fall, a series of events occurred that changed my opinion about how I live…and who I live with. It was an uneventful week and finals still seemed a lightyear away. My boyfriend and I were watching a show in my room, and he got up to get a drink of water from the kitchen. I was extremely tired and closed my eyes, only to be disturbed minutes later by my boyfriend shaking me vigorously. I asked him what was wrong, and he claimed that in the kitchen it sounded like someone was in the same room munching on chips. We joked about how it could be a ghost, I shrugged it off, but he still seemed a little uneasy about the situation.
Weeks later (yes this problem went unnoticed for WEEKS), I was sitting in the living room watching television. My roommate was at the gym, so there was no other person in the apartment beside me. I began to hear a weird sound like chips being munched on. I walked over to the kitchen and the sound grew louder right above the refrigerator; where we kept our bread, chips, and Poptarts. My initial thought was bugs. We have bugs. A chill formed down my spine, and being the wimp that I am I called my boyfriend to come over and check it out. He pulled the basket of bread, chips, etc, off the fridge and lifted the bread up for me to see. Huge bite marks were in our bread and pieces completely eaten, more chills
“Yeah, you guys have a mouse.”
He set up a camera to catch the “mouse” in action, only to find out it was a rat.
Photo Courtesy of Giphy
Let me put that into perspective, I was living with a rat for several weeks. My roommate and I were sharing our space and food with a rat. I still to this day cannot sit on my kitchen floor. Though, the shock value of this story is not the reason I am writing it. I am writing due to my building supervisor’s (sort of like a landlord) response to this.
At first, I called him and explained the situation and he seemed deeply apologetic and that this had never happened before. This situation was taken care of, but only partially. He plugged up the wall that the rat chew through, but did not kill the rat. Days later, I found more bread chewed through, and I called the building supervisor who claimed that it was impossible. I explained that an exterminator should be called, and after pleading him to take care of it, the exterminator came in and put rat poison in the wall.
Being in this situation, I realized that I had no knowledge about the role that the landlord plays, especially when it comes to pest situations. There are certain legal precautions that they have to abide by. I encourage anyone faced with this to look from a legal standpoint because you never know who might try to take advantage of you and not completely fix a situation in order to save money. Nonetheless, I did not want to end on a negative note so here is the rat on my kitchen floor: