How Not to Kill a Fucking Rat

I realize I've been away for a while, but this was something I had to post.

My wife and I are lying in bed the other evening, just switched out the light, when we hear something: a faint, intermittent watery-type sound from the bathroom. Did we leave the sink on? (One of our cats likes to drink from the faucet, and we like to humor him.) No, it sounds more like a little kid playing in the bathtub. What the heck?

I get up and turn on the bathroom light - nothing unusual to see. But the sound's coming from the toilet - a leak? Doesn't sound like any leak I've heard before. Better see what's going on in the bowl. I'll have to raise the seat and take a lo--

FUCK! RAT! FUCKING RAT!

That's right, a fucking rat is doing the breaststroke. In our toilet.

What do you do? Flush. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I try again - nothing. Damn.

My wife doesn't want me messing with rats. Rats are filthy critters, and they can bite. I don't want to mess with it either, frankly. So what then? She calls a friend who's worked with lab rats - great, except this person lives in Baltimore, and it's 1:30am there. Naturally there's no answer.

I could sic our fearless cats on it - just let them into the bathroom, lift the toilet lid, and run out of there. But no, my wife will have nothing of it. If I could get bitten, so could the cats, and any medical bill is simply out of our tax bracket right now.

Now what? We decide to call the landlady; it's late, but better than trying to sleep with a fucking rat in the toilet. Pick up the phone, dial the number - she picks up!

Me: Hi, sorry for bothering at this hour, but you'll never guess what happened...

Landlady: What?

Me: Well, um, there's a fucking rat in the toilet.

Landlady: You're kidding!

Me: Nope. Swam up the pipe, and now it's stuck...What do we do? [As if this happened all the time!]

Landlady: Well, you could get something like a bowl and a cover for it, and catch it. That way you can take it outside and let it go...

Pause here for a second. Understand, I like my landlady. She's a decent person, not strictly business and piss off if it's not business; no, she's friendly, caring. She'll buy organic cleaning products, she'll sort her trash, she won't fuss about the rent. But here methinks the landlady careth too much.

Me: Um, I don't think that's an option.

Landlady: Or I could just come over.

OK, pop quiz - what's the most appropriate response to this offer? That's right, "See you in two minutes! I'll make coffee." But do I say this? Nooooooo...

Me: Well, we'll see what we can do. If we need you, we'll call you.

Landlady: OK, sounds fine.

Now my wife has heard the conversation, or most of it. What she did hear was the fucking rat-catching business; what she didn't hear was the offer that followed. Whereas I assumed she'd heard the whole thing, so I say nothing about this offer. And my mind kicks into full fight-or-flight mode.

The funny thing about the fight-or-flight mechanism is how it hijacks your organism while leaving you with the bill; it doesn't matter what the reality of the situation is, but how you interpret it. And when the adrenaline's rushing through you, you simply don't ask questions because this is not the time to be dithering - there's something threatening out there, dammit! So options that would normally be visible to a sane human being get closed off. But - and here's the catch - you're still responsible.

Another thing: the tunnel-vision effect. When in the throes of fight-or-flight passion, implications are slow in the formation. What you see doesn't make sense for a while, you only care if you achieved your goal. It's only when the adrenaline wears off that all the ramifications flood into your mind.

My wife is naturally not keen on me catching any rats, and I've already taken on the duty of handling this situation. There's only one option left to my throbbing brain: kill the fucker. But how?

I look around the apartment for something that looks like it could deliver a lethal blow to a toilet-swimming fucking rat. A broom? - Too long. The toilet brush? - Too light, it'd just bounce off 'im. Plunger? - Oh yeah, we don't have one.

I do have these poles about 3' long that I've been saving. We bought some baker's racks, but some of the support poles weren't machined properly; this meant replacing all of them. I can't swing them in the bathroom, but I can thrust it into the toilet, St. George-style, and mash the fucking rat. It's got a rubber tip, originally for padding on floors, now for cushioning the blow slightly. It won't scratch the toilet if I miss.

My trusty weapon in hand. No fucking rat is safe.

So I take the pole into the bathroom and formulate a plan. Then I steel myself. OK, ready: One, two, three. I flush the toilet to immobilize the fucking rat, then quick-open the lid and *BAM* deliver the lethal blow. The fucking rat doesn't know what hit him until it's too late. It doesn't move.

The toilet is empty of water now: I'd flushed. So where's this water coming from, and why's it going all over the bathroom floor? I don't understand.

Then I see, and I understand. There's a hole in the bottom of the toilet, right under the fucking rat. I see the one by the other just long enough for the fucking rat carcass to hang on the edge, like that final putt at the end of Caddyshack, and then fall in. There is now a fucking rat carcass on the floor of our bathroom, surrounded on all sides by porcelain. And there's water all over the floor.

I have just slain a fucking rat and a fucking toilet. Great. Just fucking great.

The aftermath. Note that the toilet is not in our bathroom when this picture was taken, but in the driveway. We do not go to the bathroom in the driveway.

I mop up, clean off, and go to bed. But I don't sleep very well.

The cats wake me up at 5 am for breakfast, and I have to pee. This is not happening. I put some clothes on and go out for a walk in the rain. Nope, the corner Starbucks isn't open. I keep walking toward the park. On my way back home I see Starbucks has opened, but by then it's already too late.

We arrange to have a plumber come in and replace the toilet in the afternoon. The guy comes, he's a good fellow. One hour and $417 later, we can pee in our own home again.

What I Learned From My Experience

Now I'm a teacher by profession. There are at least three things to learn from all this:

Lesson #1: Toilets are not indestructible. You know this only from the movies, not usually from real life. The worst we hit a toilet with is pee and poo, which even apes know are relatively soft. But toilets - they are heavy and solid, so it's natural to think they're tough. Right? Wrong.

Let's calculate the force of that lethal blow. Now the steel bar weighs about 2 pounds, and it's 7/8 of an inch thick. I'd guess it took all of 0.1 second to ram that fucker into the toilet, and it might have traveled about 12 inches.

Now acceleration = (vf - vi)/t, so the pole accelerated at a rate of 2 feet per second^2. If F = ma, then

(2 lb of steel x 10 ft per second^2) = 200 foot-pounds per second^2

At the moment of impact, which probably lasted about 1/100 of a second, all that force was transferred to the toilet bowl - that makes 2000 foot-pounds. Convert that to inches for the next step, so 24000 inch-pounds.

Since it was delivered entirely through the end of the pole, whose area is 1.373"in^2, the amount of force would be 24000 inch-pounds per in^2 / 0.73 inch= almost 17500 PSI.

Between the steel pole and the vitreous china, it's clear which one would break. The tensile strength of steel is 40000 PSI, whereas that of of vitreous china is only 4000-800 kgf/cm^2, or 5600-11200 PSI, far lower than the steel bar - even when cushioned by the rubber tip and the fucking rat carcass.

Let me reiterate that:

(2 lb of steel x 10 ft per second^2) x 0.01 sec
= 200 foot-pounds of force

Now, just for hypothetical purposes, let's replace the steel bar with the equivalent of poo:

(2 lb of poo x 10 ft per second^2) x 0.01 sec
= 200 foot-pounds of *splat*

Enough said. I don't know the tensile strength of poo, but I expect this would be the result. Which leads us to...

Lesson #2: Toilets make lousy fucking rat traps. There are several reasons why they are unfeasible options for destroying the fucking rat problem:

1. Fucking rats very rarely come up the pipe.

2. Toilet fucking rat traps rely on someone doing guard duty. And who wants to stand around waiting for a fucking rat to come up the pipe?

3. They are not idiot-proof.

4. They break rather easily, as shown above.

5. They're expensive to buy and install.

But perhaps this is too abstract for you. Let's take a concrete example, like New York City. Even at a conservative estimate, we'd have to use up 44 million toilets to rid the city of its fucking rats. This adds up to a cost of 44 million man-hours (not including travel time and loading) and $18.3 billion. Even the Pentagon would pass on that offer - and we haven't even considered the baby fucking rats that get left behind and grow up.

This leads us to...

Lesson #3: If you find a fucking rat in your toilet, call the landlady. Don't wait for her to invite herself over, just get her to come by. And don't forget to make coffee.