We had some excitement at the work location I call "The North Campus" awhile back. Normally unstaffed, it is divided into four main rooms and a very large garage, with the washroom and a kitchenette. The two largest rooms are equipment rooms, with fire-rated walls and doors, one at the front of the building and one at the back. They don't share ventilation systems and have no intentional connections.
The back room is mostly minor and out-of-service stuff these days. I'm not in there a lot. One fine day, I opened the door to find...chaos. Insanity. The floor (and many elevated flat surfaces) was uniformly scattered with...stuff. Black shreds. Green pellets. Blotches of liquid. And poison-bait mousetraps, badly chewed up and opened. It looked deliberate and malicious.
Nothing was stirring. I stepped around cautiously and the mess was everywhere. I thought we had rats and I called our Building Maintenance supervisor to let him know we needed an exterminator, badly, and soon.
He was on site with the hour. He wages an unrelenting battle against vermin at the main campus, especially every variety of rodent, and it took him about thirty seconds to know the enemy: "You've got a squirrel."
Yes, a squirrel. A cute little fuzzy woodland creature, amusing as they bounce busily around, gathering, eating and hiding nuts and berries, chasing and playing.... Indoors, they're not so cute. While hand-raised squirrels were once popular pets, wild ones don't cope well with being indoors. It makes them panicky. And it turns out that what kills a mouse mostly intoxicates a squirrel. We had one regular-sized squirrel. It made a king-sized mess.
There's a lesson there. Take a thing out of its normal environment, let it run loose, and you may get outsized effects. Damaging ones.
Take a sleazy, attention-craving real estate promoter with a long history of litigation and stiffing contractors and put him into a powerful position in national politics and you get chaos. Insanity. You get Donald Trump. The Authoritarian Playbook: 2025 has a well-researched report on what that particular fuzzy little woodland creature is promising and it's bad news. Perhaps you found his antics amusing in his natural environment, but the Presidency ain't it.
The squirrel we had at the North Campus was live-trapped and set free among trees, far from homes and businesses. It's time to do the same on the national level, and if the courts only intoxicate the pest, there's always the ballot box. Before he makes an even bigger mess.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
3 comments:
I work in a WWII era plant in Akron. We have raccoons. Equally entertaining.
The old advice is that 'when someone tells you who they are, believe them'.
Trump has repeatedly told us that he doesn't respect rule of law, the US Constitution, the principles that underly the same, or the social contract. He's telling us in ALL CAPS that as POTUS, he can do anything he wants with no accountability to the other branches of government. That he's going to make personal loyalty a priority over competence should he win reelection.
And due to a thin veneer of the shallowest RahRah Patriotism imaginable, his fawning myrmidons lap it up.
Darn...I thought this was going to be a nice job story. I also have a North Campus to work at, and while I've not had squirrels, I've dealt with mice, snakes, and a raccoon. I once visited a radio station client late at night and found a squirrel standing on the receptionist's desk. What fun!
And then came the second-to-last paragraph. I viewed the linked report, and it's scary-good. I think I've already read and understood all of the points in the report over time, but the report brought all the data together into a 2x4 ready to smack you in the head and remind you of the danger ahead.
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