Three Blind Mice

It’s not often that I think I should take my cat to work with me, however, today whilst cleaning a sofa I had a little surprise when I lifted a cushion. One live mouse went scurrying along the base of the sofa and 3 of his mates had already died under the same cushion. It was a bit like a Doomsday Cult meeting the Mickey Mouse club.

It occurred to me how much of my work comes to me as a result of the actions of others, particularly animals and children.

You see the reason I was called to clean the sofa was that it had a really bad smell to it. There’s a number of young children in the home, so sour milk, vomit, discarded yoghurt, any of those culprits might have caused the odour and it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d found any or all of them.

The troubling thing was that there was no visible sign of anything causing the odour. The basic rule in odour elimination is to first and foremost eliminate the cause. We have a great product which breaks down proteins and returns them to a liquid form for extraction, this usually lights up dairy and vomit spills like a Christmas tree.

It was only after I’d been working away for a while that I remembered the unmistakable smell of a dead mouse. I’ve previously lived in Edinburgh in Scotland and when a mouse dies in those old horsehair plaster walls, well it’s a smell you don’t forget for a while. It occurred to me that there was probably another mouse in a bit sicker state than the first four we’d already found. Tipping the sofa upside down I found the corps in a hole in the base of the sofa.

If nothing else at least their pest control baits were working.

Having removed the source, we removed the smell and returned the home to a much rosier state. We can’t blame the kids for that one.