Few people have gone into a police station to say to the dispatcher, “I need to report a mouse.” I suspect that when I did, the dispatcher had her foot near the floor panic button, but she did calm down a little when told the details.
I had just come down from an escarpment where a number of the city transmitters were located. In one particular building (QTH) were a couple of FM transmitters (that I looked after) plus an analog cellular basestation (with alarms always going off), a pager transmitter, and the City’s communication racks. I had seen the mouse scarper into the police racks as I came in the door.
The dispatcher still didn’t really get it. The mouse was healthy looking and rather well fed, I told her. “What do you think it’s eating?” I asked. A shake of the head from her. “Cable insulation,” I told her. “
Your cable insulation!”
Anybody who has worked on transmitter stations has encountered the odd rodent. Usually, it is by smell. Not being terribly knowledgeable about conductivity, the lucky ones get zapped by 30 kV with the capability of delivering a decent current, while the unlucky ones get only 250 V with a couple of hundred milliamperes.
You can never get to the remains; they fall into cable trenches or behind transformers where you cannot see them, let alone reach them. After a few years you can differentiate between the exclusively different odors that a mouse and a rat give off during decomposition.
Decaying matter in enclosed spaces has been the stuff of urban legend when it comes to safe-deposit boxes in banks. I have seen stories where the bank was located in Orlando, in Atlanta, in Chicago. But the story is always similar: a man/woman is turned down for a loan by the bank. He/she then puts a dead fish in his/her safe-deposit box and throws away his/her key.
Once the smell starts it is a while before the bank can start to localize it to a group of boxes and then to an individual box. The customer is contacted and he/she tells the bank that the key is lost. Eventually, when the odor is evident through the whole building, the bank finally manages to get a court order to drill out the customer's lock.
Has it ever actually happened? It seems it has. In 1983 the Mellon Bank called in a loan given to a Pittsburgh company, Mesta Machine Corp, who made equipment for the manufacture of steel products. The company had to terminate 1200 people. It turned out that the bank, whose slogan was “It’s a neighbor you can count on,” had heavily invested in a Japanese company whose products Mesta could have challenged…
The United Steelworkers' local started an active campaign against the bank including
dealing in pennies with the tellers and putting dead fish in safe-deposit boxes. Local clergy also took part and there were multiple arrests and in-bank violence. Urban legend stories might have had the various banks waiting for court orders to drill out the box locks: Mellon Bank did not.
Some two years ago a new species of ant invaded Texas (Homeland Security evidently didn’t apprehend them coming off a boat). One of a type of crazy ants (normal ants move in line – serial?) who move any-which-way (parallel?) They are less than an inch long and they can bite – but have no sting. Locals should be extremely grateful to the ants that they actually attack, and like, a diet of fire ants. They have been named after the exterminator who first found them and failed to, well, exterminate them: Tom Raspberry.
Unfortunately the
Raspberry ant is causing a lot of damage and is yet another creature attracted to electrical insulation, getting into computers and causing shorts, as well as damaging gas meters and pumps. The death cycle is inevitable, right? I guess I’m going to have to go to the Gulf Coast to acquaint myself with the odor of decaying ants, in order to add to my “smell catalog.”
