{"id":6717,"date":"2025-03-05T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=6717"},"modified":"2025-03-02T17:13:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T00:13:30","slug":"mouse-in-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2025\/03\/mouse-in-the-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Mouse in the city"},"content":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve spent most of my career in IT, as corporate as it gets. Today, I am in a job for a city government which is very different. <br \/><br \/>I\u2019m living the life of to a city mouse.<br \/><br \/>As the men come in and out of our ground floor work area in their high visibility vests, doors can be left open for convenience. Real work has to get done, and our customers\u2014the Residents\u2014call to tell us about water leaks and felled tree branches.<br \/><br \/>We are not virtual. We are close to the earth.<br \/><br \/>This week, I was wrapping up my work in preparation to leave for the day when by cube neighbor asked \u201cDid you see the black widow?\u201d<br \/><br \/>I slowly turned to him\u2014confused and with growing horror.<br \/><br \/>He nods at me, \u201cYes, it\u2019s spider season and there are probably a lot of them around.\u201d<br \/><br \/>Oh, that\u2019s reassuring. \u201cI thought you meant one in this building.\u201d<br \/><br \/>He smiled, with male delight at my horror. \u201cI did. I\u2019ve been watching it to see where it will go.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cWhy would you watch it? It should be killed! What are you waiting for?!\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cI agree, I definitely want it killed.\u201d<br \/><br \/>I\u2019m out of my seat now. \u201cDo you know where it is?\u201d <br \/><br \/>He\u2019s gotten out of his chair too, now that I\u2019m activated. \u201cIt\u2019s right there,\u201d he says, pointing to the corner of the room.<br \/><br \/>\u201cIT\u2019s HERE!? Are you sure it\u2019s a black widow? Show me.\u201d<br \/><br \/>He cannot hide his glee at my alarm, and he takes me the 20 steps to the exterior door where a fat-bottomed horror hangs between some unused cube shelves in a little alcove.<br \/><br \/>\u201cSee? He\u2019s very happy there, no reason to move. But if he\u2019s gotta be killed, I want to make sure he\u2019s dead.\u201d<br \/><br \/>Spider was cleverly not in a squishable position.<br \/><br \/>\u201cShe. All black widows are female.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cOh, right.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cShe looks like she\u2019s about pop into hundreds of baby poison spiders.\u201d<br \/><br \/>He chuckles. \u201cI guess I should put in a request in a work request to have the exterminator handle it.\u201d<br \/><br \/>I\u2019m looking around for some spider killing spray, but nothing is nearby.<br \/><br \/>\u201cOr I could ask Eduardo..\u201d<br \/><br \/>I grabbed my stuff and got out of there. I forgot about the spider until halfway through the next day.<br \/><br \/>I knew what he meant about Eduardo. This guy liked insects, and had a pet scorpion in a cage about the size of  a shoebox. Everyone knew this about Eduardo because the scorpion cage came to work almost every day, spending time in different offices. He had trick of glowing in the dark, so people would sometimes turn off the light and admire the him by flashing a special flashlight on him that made him glow even brighter.<br \/><br \/>It wasn\u2019t until  I saw Eduardo in the coffee area that I remembered the Widow. <br \/><br \/>\u201cGood morning!\u201d I said with a big smile. \u201cHow\u2019s you pet?\u201d<br \/><br \/>He gave me a dark look, \u201cWhich one?\u201d<br \/><br \/>Oops. Had I stepped in something? \u201cYour scorpion..\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cOh, the scorpion. He\u2019s fine.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cIs there more to the story?\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cMy centipede hasn\u2019t been doing so well.\u201d<br \/><br \/>Curiouser and Curiouser.  \u201cI\u2019m sorry to hear that.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cHe\u2019s not with us anymore.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201coh no. Did anybody talk to you about the Spider?\u201d<br \/><br \/>Eduardo bobbed his head up. \u201cOh yeah.  I said I didn\u2019t want to get involved with that mess\u201d<br \/><br \/>We both separated with our coffee and I wondered about Eduardo\u2019s  definition of a mess when it came to insects. It was clear why my co-worker thought of him as a place to home the spider.<br \/><br \/>I went over to the spider\u2019s lair and found an empty web.<br \/><br \/>This increases my concern.<br \/><br \/>Now I am worried about multiple baby spiders crawling out of unexpected crevices.<br \/><br \/>I suspect this won\u2019t be the last unexpected surprise in my life as a city mouse.<br \/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve spent most of my career in IT, as corporate as it gets. Today, I am in a job for a city government which is very different. I\u2019m living the life of to a city mouse. As the men come &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2025\/03\/mouse-in-the-city\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6718,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717\/revisions\/6718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}