At around 8:00 a round of frantic screaming wafted into my apartment from down the hall. I figured this was just another emphatic greeting of unusually large proportions.

Then, some time later, another round of screaming began. And another. Each separated by some twenty or thirty minutes. By the ninth round (seriously) I figured I should find out what was going on.

I learned three things.

First, these screams each came from different groups (usually pairs) of people. Second, these groups were independently discovering that a mouse was romping about the hallway. Third, none of them (until the ninth) thought this was an event worth mentioning to anybody else.

Personally I think if you encounter a critter in your house you should either get rid of it yourself or call someone else who can. In this case, it took nine rounds of discovery and reaction to reach such a conclusion.

For the record, I haven’t seen so much as a mosquito here until now. We don’t get a lot of non-human visitors this high up the building. And if we didn’t have elevators I doubt we’d even have many of those.