[MD] (OT) The Sunday of the Mouse

[Andy Skelton]

[I have done a lot of things. This story is true AFAIR. I tell it at
parties to burn my image in people's minds. It is pretty far off topic
but there was a request for a personal introduction. If you want
specifics about me, they are mostly very findable. I have Google
thinking I'm the most important Andy Skelton on the internet.]

Soon after Y2K I left a tech support job in a call center due to a
health issue. Couldn't breathe, couldn't talk on the phone. I got a
temp job wrangling a pallet jack and quickly became the department's
database expert. Before the end of the year I switched again because
the corporate bullshit wasn't worth the pay. I moved from
multi-billion companies where I was nobody to a computer forensics lab
in the mother-in-law wing of my employer's house. He also shared the
space with an administrative assistant. When she wasn't around, it was
man central.

It had to be. Computer forensics was not something we could have done
in a socially sterile environment. Political correctness was assailed
every instant by the contents of the hard drives we examined and the
hidden sides of people we revealed. We searched, compiled, and
reported to our clients about digital documentation of deceit and
abuse. It took a thick skin.

We got jobs from local PD, sheriffs, staties, feds, even RCMP. But the
best ones were the private investigator jobs.

I remember fondly the job we did for a woman who co-owned a successful
direct-marketing business with her husband. The woman came to us
because she knew that her husband was having an affair with the office
floozy. She wanted to know how deep the affair had gone. She wanted to
wave the evidence in his face and make him stop screwing around. She
wanted him to choose her, or hit the road and leave her with the
entire fortune.

We had heard this all before. This was bread and butter to us. Since
the wife co-owned the business, she felt it was well within her rights
to inspect the company computers. Our job was to acquire the data
without the perps knowing. If the investigation were known, the jig
would be up and the wife might not have any standing. No problem, we'd
just go to the office on the weekend and skedaddle after a few hours
of dd'ing disks in BeOS.

The boss saw no fizz in this foray. He'd had his fill of field work
for the week and his family got upset when he worked weekends. So it
was to be my first solo acquisition.

I arrived at business address, a suite between a gas station and a
hairdresser in a 70's strip mall, with my gear and my lunch. The
janitor was an old friend of the wife and sympathetic to her plight.
He was a short, rotund man of indeterminate ancestry. A fat, old,
lovable mutt of a man. He cheerfully opened the door for me, showed me
to my workspace and then locked up and kept the lights dim so nobody
driving by would think people were inside.

The janitor was really into the stealth aspect of this job. This was
his supporting role in a Mission Impossible film. He had parked a
block away. I parked right in front of the door. Whatever.

Once I had my gear set up, he showed me around the suite. It was just
a bunch of private offices and a kitchen. Only two of the offices were
of any interest: those of the husband and the floozy.

We later learned all of their dirty little pet names from scouring
their emails. The list was long and we were too respectful to write it
down. I just remember laughing for hours over Pussy Pants. Anyway, I
digress.

The two offices were in a strange condition. The janitor had purchased
several rolls of blue masking tape and spent the early morning hours
affixing each and every item of office materiel in its place. Objects
were removed only after their footprints were outlined in blue tape.
There were five blue C's on the floor where the wheels of the office
chair had come to rest before the floozy had left on Friday. The
janitor was unbelievably thorough.

He was also very creative. I was prepared to ignore the shattered
sheet of clear plastic on the floozy's floor behind her chair and
concentrate on the computers. While I waited for a large hard drive to
be copied into a file on an even larger one, the janitor told me what
had happened. I couldn't stop him in his glee.

Just like I did when I was a janitor, he had a big keyring. There was
no place he was forbidden to tidy up. However, the lock on the
floozy's door had been changed very recently without his knowledge.
Rather than try to draw conclusions, he got busy bypassing the lock.
He accessed the hair salon next door, climbed into the suspended
ceiling with his fat little body (bless him) crawled over the wall and
lowered himself into the office. That was hard work, especially when
you have to bring a ladder with you so you can get down, and he did a
good job not making a huge mess of the ceiling tiles. But the 4'x2'
lens from one of the fluorescent lights had fallen out of the ceiling
and shattered on the floor.

He had considered his options. He looked for a replacement and found
none. This being a Sunday, the store that sold them was closed. He
decided to leave the mess exactly as it lay and concoct a plausible
story. After marking the rough outline of the wreckage with blue tape
to help us avoid stepping in it, he removed the doorknob and walked
out of the building with gleeful giggles in his wake.

An hour later he was back with a fresh set of keys made by his
locksmith friend and a brown paper sack and a look of sublime
satisfaction. He left the sack in the kitchen and got to work
reinstalling the doorknob. I had just finished copying the last hard
drive and was just about to ask him to lock the door after I left. He
stopped me with his hands full of grass and other debris from the lawn
and he told me the story of the fluorescent light.

He was weaving the debris into the rough shape of a nest. He said he
wasn't sure what a rodent's nest looked like but it would be good
enough to convince everyone in the office. He climbed the ladder and
stashed the nest on top of a ceiling tile.

In his story, there had been a mouse living in the ceiling of the
office. There was extra value to this scheme because, as we all know,
all floozies are frightened and sickened by the mere idea of rodents.
By the time she recovered from the shock of the knowledge that there
had been a mouse just a few feet above her head for unknown months,
the shards of plastic would have been forgotten.

While on the ladder, the janitor removed one of the punch-outs from
the light fixture's chassis. This was where the mouse had curiously
climbed through just before crashing to its death on the floor eight
feet below. He stuck traces of fresh mouse fur to the rough edges of
the hole to create evidence that, in my estimation, nobody would
bother looking for. He did it for his own enjoyment.

When everything was back in its place and the blue tape all crushed
into several trash bags and we were ready to go, he went to the
kitchen to fetch the paper sack out of the freezer. It was from a pet
store that was open on Sundays. He dumped the now frozen mouse onto
the pile of shards, bit it fare well, and locked the floozy's office
with a flourish. His masterpiece was complete.

I never heard about the aftermath in that office so I guess it went
according to plan. We engrossed ourselves with the evidence I
gathered. It was a nasty mess. The husband had squirreled away enough
cash to buy a cabin on the lake where he would meet the floozy while
he was ostensibly out of town on business. We hoped his wife left him
standing naked in the rain but since she never came back for the full
evidence we guess she settled it without a court battle.

As I said, it's a true story. I enjoy telling it.

Andy