The Rats! The Rats! How Mac & Meyer Took to the Hallway

This week I conducted an experiment with rats. It's fine. They're plastic.

I acquired them through a random act of curiosity connected to a running gag related to this video, part of a longer documentary, Frozen to Death on Pikes Peak, which I helped produce several moons ago. "The Rats! The Rats!"



Having only a vague notion of what would happen, I set one plastic rat in the hallway, and later two -- to spice up the day, you know.

They were ignored, laughed at, questioned, and stepped on like guitar pedals (nice one Sean). Did I mention they squeak? At the end of day one, my co-worker friend Danny named them Mac and Meyer. It was also noted they would look more like real rats if I sprayed them gray. I considered giving one pink spots at this point, but it almost seemed like plastic animal cruelty.

This is Mac. I forgot to take a picture of him in the hallway, so now he's posing on my table. Surprisingly, no cat has attacked him yet -- maybe if he was gray?

Meyer has wandered off. He sat in the hallway for a couple of days with Mac before going into hiding. I'm kind of happy that when Meyer disappeared people noticed. "Where's the other rat?" "Did someone wander off with the second rat?" "Oh that's sad. Someone took the rat." "Where'd he go?"

Don't worry, I know exactly where he crawled off to (unless he moves *shudder).

As the week scurried along, the rats caused a lot of laughs from passersby, many questions of "Why is there a rat in the hallway?" (always directed at me like I knew *shrug), one giant "WHOA!" one "I thought that was real for a second!" a small gasp that I missed, one "I love the rats!" one kick, and an ongoing step on the rat to make it squeak game.

I consider this a successful experiment. I accidentally made a lot of people smile this week through a couple goofy red-eyed rats, and that's kind of cool.

I think the best part, though, is there was no planning -- no forethought or hindsight. I just picked up the rat, and set it in the hall to see what would happen, and then I did it again the next day, and the next, and the next. Maybe it was a rebellion against my own mind's tendency to think everything through thoroughly. Should I do this? Should I not? Should I just sit on this idea for a bit until it tastes a bit more like stew? There was none of that. There were only rats. My shrugs were true. I have no idea why the rats were in the hallway.

I didn't really think I'd write an entire entry about rats when this week began. I wasn't even sure I could when I first said I would. There are many more pressing issues bubbling down in my throat, words that aren't forming into sentences very well. Items that don't fit nicely onto a checklist. Questions, whose answers I know, but keep asking, because they aren't like hallway rats, and you can't just throw them out there and see what happens. Well, I mean, you can... but...

On a side note: I made a Blue Moon playlist on Spotify (like you do) and songs with the word "moon" in the title are all generally good -- no rats among them yet. Maybe I'll share my favorites (new and old) in my next entry, or maybe I'll just write about plastic rats again. It's really hard to say.