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If my grandfather had been in the office that day, there would have been much harrumphing at the tender-hearted folks who would, most assuredly, not share his belief that an infestation of mice was something to be met with a heel of a workboot. Especially if that workboot were bedazzled with remnants of cow patties and garden soil.

But as it stood, there were only tender-hearted folks in my office. Folks who had no idea what to do when it became apparent that there was not just one mouse sneaking through the cubicles – there were hundreds. You might guess that hundreds of mice searching for crumbs can cause a serious panic in a cubicle setting, and you would be correct.

The first to sound the alarm was Katie the Intern. She returned to the meeting room from the copier with a facial expression that rivaled Faye Wray when she met King Kong. Since our offices were not expansive enough to allow the stealthy arrival of a 40-foot tall primate, I figured something was up. When she sat down next to me with the freshly collated TPS reports, I leaned toward her, hiding my whisper with my Diet Rite can, “Are you okay?”, I asked. I didn’t really need the can, as Donald the Inappropriate Dancer continued to deliver his budget review without missing a beat. Not a surprise, since he rarely notices anything unless it’s visible in a mirror.

Katie breathily shared that while she was replacing the toner in the copier, she saw something scurry behind the stack of file folder boxes against the wall. Not one to be written off as a typical girly-girl, she pulled the stack away from the wall to see if it was a mouse as she suspected. Indeed, it was a mouse… and six other mice, all huddled together in hopes that they would go unnoticed against the high-traffic commercial carpeting that used to be cream but has transformed into a strangely mousey gray/brown over the decade or so since it was installed. The manufacturer blames the fluorescent lights.

I questioned Katie, thinking surely she miscounted. She was, afterall, a poetry major. Surely, if there were that many rodents in the office, someone would have noticed them before now. But the little beads of sweat forming on her temple told me it was true. “But only seven, right?” I asked, “I mean… that’s just a family having an outing. An exterminator can take care of that tonight when we are out of the building.”

She shook her head and whispered vehemently, “They’re everywhere!”

Apparently, when she went to the ladies’ room to compose herself, she encountered some of the extended population living it up behind the trash bin. And in the break room, there was a faint scratching sound behind the refrigerator.

I looked up from my coffee and noticed quizzical looks on the faces of the other peons around the table (Donald was oblivious, of course). I followed their gazes as they looked beyond the room we were seated in, which was made up of three walls of glass as meeting rooms in 1980s-era office buildings are wont to be. It was clear there was something amiss amongst the cubicles. Heads, and occasionally arms of other peons were popping up here and there around the space, eyes wide and mouths set in “oh” shapes, or grimaces of disgust. Some were running out of their cubicles altogether only to stand with their backs to the solid walls around the edges of the office, looking around as if they couldn’t believe what they were experiencing, hoping for a nod of recognition and support from their co-workers.

The siege, it seemed, was on.