When living with strangers, one must adopt strange tactics in dealing with other’s bad habits. Let’s call these tactics, albeit lies, “diplomacy.”
Now we have a problem in our flat: I have spotted mice on several occasions in the kitchen. My response was natural, I wanted to clean the kitchen, put all signs of food away, and let the little buggers die out. Simple enough, right? I told the other flatmates of my intentions, but for some reason, we just don’t see eye to eye on this.
Flatmate Fault #1
There is a culture of leaving the trashcan lid open for some reason. We have a very generic university-supplied bin that requires you to open and close the lid manually. Now I grew up with fancier trashcans with the “step control” features that enable the user to easily open and close the lid, but basically I got the point of trashcan responsibility: you keep the damn thing closed.
Whenever I found the lid open–and this is always–I put the lid back on, only to find the lid tossed aside within the hour. I didn’t understand this. Don’t they realise that we have mice?
I reached my boiling point this morning and taking advantage of everyone’s general fear of rodents, I wrote a little note and taped it to the top of the bin lid. This is what it said:
Hi! Last night I saw a mouse jump out of the trashcan. Can we please keep the bin lid closed? Thanks!
Fear always works well in getting people to do what you want in say the political realm, so I am hoping that fear will work in this case too. If this doesn’t work, I can play up the mouse sightings. I will write something like this:
Hi! Last night I saw two mice eat your awful trash, have sex, and release approximately 100 mice babies into the trashcan. They ran away, but they will be back if we don’t keep the bin closed. Thanks!
I should really just tell them straight off that I don’t want to smell trash in the kitchen, it’s just gross; yet, I’ve decided to take a route of lies. The test begins now.
