There Are No Cats in Korea and the Streets Are Filled with Fish

I work in a large construction trailer-type building that the U.S. government rents from a Korean construction company.  It has metal walls and linoleum floors and is prime housing for spiders and mosquitoes. Each morning I come to work and wipe off all the surfaces of my desk because there's a thin layer of dead mosquitoes covering everything.  And the occasional Charlotte will build her web or crawl across my computer monitor as she pleases.  Overall I'm not too concerned because the spray and the spiders work together to keep me from being eaten alive during the daily grind.

However, late last week I became much, much less comfortable at work: we have mice.  Fievel and his family the Mousekowitzes have moved in.  Eeeew.  I thought I was the first person to spot a little sucker running across the aisle between cubicles and I immediately raised a fuss to the admin support person to lodge a complaint to our building's owners.  Thankfully she called them up right away, albeit after climbing up to sit on her desk.

After asking around, some of the men I work with (Americans) said they've seen mice and one guy said he even had one try to crawl up his pant leg while he was at his desk!  But no one saw a reason to be alarmed.  Who hasn't heard of the hantavirus?!? (Dork research note: hantavirus was originally named Korean hemorrhagic fever and was discovered during the Korean War!)  I'm alarmed, especially when one coworker got back from a long trip and had a nest of baby mice in a box in his cubicle. All together, four people have discovered these mice nests- one even had 11 babies!!  Again, eeeew.

I did a very thorough inspection of my cubicle and found little droppings in my file cabinets, so at lunchtime I went home to get gloves and Lysol and change from a skirt and sandals into pants and shoes.

So here's where this story gets Korea-ified.... 

The exterminators were called in and a team of three young men arrived wearing suits and ties with gelled hair and trendy glasses, looking more like a boy-band than exterminators.  They gave us a presentation about their plan to remove the mice, and it consisted of a three month strategy to compel the mice to leave "with humanity" rather than killing them all in a day or two.  Don't send PETA after me, but I'd be much happier removing the mice in a day or two!  The exterminators did their inspection of the nests and each one picked up a piece of mouse poop in his bare hand.  It really cracked me up to see these impeccably dressed people on their hands and knees picking up mouse poop.  Only in Korea!

Now all over the office are these shoe-box sized traps with big arrows and signs in English that say "Bait Here" and "Trap Here."  I guess we're lucky these are Korean mice who probably can't read English.  And here's my favorite part of the whole thing: for bait the traps don't use cheese or peanut butter.  Rather, they use tiny little dried fish the size of anchovies.  Again, only in Korea.