So my roommates are not the cleanest when it comes to kitchen duty. Apparently last night, one of my roommates and I were sitting around and my other roommate reported seeing either a rat or mouse just swiftly run by, but wasn’t entirely sure.
Well, he decided to confirm this by leaving out a bunch of cheese in a certain arrangement. We woke up this morning and the arrangement was missing one piece.
So now we’re pretty sure there’s a mouse or other rodent at least.
Should we take care of this problem ourselves, or should we let the housing office/RA know? I was in favor of going to the RA since the problem could be more severe than we know, but my roommates were like, “We could just kill it ourselves.”
I would definitely tell your RA. This isn’t something that you should solving. Plus if you kill one then there could always be more. I think you contact maintenance and let them know. They might have traps or whatnot. Also I am sure they wanted it documented that your place has mice just to take of the problem for future residents of the place you are living in.
Oh dude, we (I, rather) mentioned it to our RA and she told me, “What you’ll need to do is go to blahblahblah.university.junk online and fill out a work order for repair because there’s nothing I can do about it.”
So I went online to the work order website for housing and sent in our suspicion about the mouse. The next morning, I got an email saying my repair request had been approved and that it had been forwarded to the university’s contractor for pest control.
And the contractor came in the afternoon and essentially did nothing. We had already gone to Wal-Mart to purchase some sticky traps, and so they saw the traps out in place already and seriously just said, “Oh, okay, well call us if you need anything else!”
…srsly?
Well our traps did catch the mouse, and we took pictures and one video and submitted it to the RA and she said she’ll work on getting a notice sent out to the building in the foreseeable future.
So it’s like no one cares to do anything about it.
These are brand new dorms I live in, which it highly surprises me that I’ve been met with apathy from the people that you would think should want to prevent this further.
Another thing you can do is to contact the RD (Residence Director, they are one step above your RA) or go to the housing people and tell someone there. I mean having mice in your place is really unhealthy and could make you or your roommates sick. In the meantime, try creating a cleaning schedule to keep the mess in control. I know cleaning sucks, but having mice sucks even more. Best of luck!
Mice don’t always come in multiples. Sometimes a mouse gets in a building just simply seeking warmth, and then food left out will attract that mouse to your room. If you want to test whether you have more mice, leave some sticky traps out overnight – put a couple of them (or more) together with a little bit of peanut butter (mice can not resist) on the edge and place them in a way that the mouse would have to travel onto the sticky part to get at it. If you don’t have a mouse by the next morning, then you no longer have a mouse problem.
I don’t want to be mean, but I honestly don’t know what else you wanted the RA or maintenance to do. All the RA can do is direct you to maintenance. It’s not their job to go mice-hunting in your dorm. All maintenance would do (most likely) is set traps, which you already did. If you hadn’t gotten traps, they likely would have provided you with something (I would hope!). If the problem persists, then contact them again. If it seems like more extreme action needs to be taken, then they may move you to another room if one is available, while they handle the problem. That’s what happened when a dorm I lived in had a flea problem.