I knew something was afoul when Sharmila said she smelt a rat. I had spotted a garden rat recently in the garage – which is a rarity for us since there is virtually nothing on the garage floor for them to hide behind. (All the stuff is inside the cabinets that are clear two feet above). The one that I had seen was actually moving around furtively around the ladder!!

Next day, I put in a few rat poisons near the entrance of the garage and evidently succeeded in two days flat. The problem is there was no telling where the dead rat was. Finally, I had to resort to those immigration and customs dog-like sniffing to figure out that the stink was wafting from behind the refrigerator.

Okay, I thought, no issues. Pushed the refrigerator out a few feet and found to my dismay that there was nothing – other than unseemly dust. It took me some time to realize that the stink was coming from inside the contraptions behind the fridge.

The next one and a half hours was a sight. The rat had certainly extracted its revenge on human beings. There was my wife in the front of the fridge pivoting it to the ground, my father in law pushing from behind to tip it forward and me on the ground trying to wedge the fridge with the stink coming straight at me.

Finally opened up the back panel and that dratted rat had firmly wedged itself behind the fan before dying! There was no way of reaching it. So, two sets of gloves, multiple screwdrivers, hammer, wrenches and miscellaneous other tools later, the rat was pulled out in the open! Somehow my wife and my FIL had a lot of work to run to precisely at the moment I pulled out the dead half rotten rat.

The joy of a job well done was completely marred by the intricacies of putting everything back together. Somehow, things come out pretty quick. They are just too stubborn to go back in. Took me fifteen minutes to position the fan and the initial two screws together.

Finally, when I had triumphantly put everything back together, I noticed that together with my tools, I had a couple of screws to spare!!! I was NOT going to open it up again. Just powered it up and it seemed to work. So, I left it there.

Richer by a dead rat and two screws, I could not but chuckle at the irony of three human beings having to put their intellectual might just to outwit a dead rat!!!!

Reminded me of an old Ogden Nash poem about how hunters make duck noise to attract ducks…

The Hunter
—————–
The hunter crouches in his blind
‘Neath camouflage of every kind
And conjures up a quacking noise
To lend allure to his decoys
This grown-up man, with pluck and luck
is hoping to outwit a duck