Never a dull moment

So, I am sitting down in my office to start on my day's work, when I spot something moving out of the corner of my eye.

I look over, and see a mouse on the floor. A white mouse. (So I knew it wasn't just some random mouse that wandered in from outside, unless there's some escaped population of labmice around).

I am not really afraid of mice, but I don't like to get too close to them; years and years ago, one of my grade-school classrooms had pet mice and I remember one day the teacher let us hold them and one bit me. Yeah. (It didn't break the skin but it kind of hurt all the same).

So I stood looking at the mouse in brief amazement, and then thought, "I should capture the little booger and return him to whomever he belongs to."

(Then I remembered that one of my colleagues had had a couple white mice as "demonstration" animals for a class he was teaching in the interim - it's one of those classes for teachers who want to goose up their qualifications and learn how to do experimental science in the classroom).

Fortunately, I had an empty coffee jar on my bookshelf - one of my colleagues had been saving his instant coffee jars for me to make kill jars out of for capturing bugs (yes, I know, it's complicated...). So I grabbed the jar, dumped out the tiny bit of residual coffee, and with a little effort, popped it over the mouse.

And then I went down the hall and found Colleague, and asked him, "Have you had an escapee in the past couple days?"

He was kind of embarrassed - yes, he had, but apparently had not seen fit to WARN us (like I said, I'm not afraid of mice but some people might be). So he came down and retrieved it.

But yeah, never a dull moment at my U.