Rat in the Coffee Machine

Our New Red Jura Angel

One of the great challenges living in a ground floor apartment in the tropics is coming face-to-face with local wildlife. Giant cockroaches, ants and flying bugs is common on any floor, as are geckoes - we like geckoes. Snakes are a little rarer and we’ve had the delight of one snake pop in for a visit. While I wasn’t home to deal with the excitement, the story goes that everyone shat themselves. We also had one rat not long after we moved in last August. The little bugger ran down my body during the night, which got a super dooper screech out of me at 3am in the morning, let me tell you! 

Steve never went back to sleep after that. I did.

We think the early rat disappeared and another has moved into the kitchen. The evidence of rat activity is startling. Every morning something has been munched, but do you think we can find the bloody rat? Not at all and Vick is on the case - let me tell you when Vick is on the case, no wildlife gets out of this house alive! She’s a serious woman.

But we have a backup plan too and we signed Rentokil to help us out. These useless chaps have not solved anything, culminating in delivering sticky traps, which mean one thing - rats running around the apartment with sticky goo on their bodies, making sure said goo goes everywhere! Impossible to get off.

We are not getting a return on that investment….

However things escalated this week, when we were all set up to make a coffee and the machine didn’t work. Vick then told us she’d found rat pooh in the coffee machine the day before, and upon further investigation, there was more rat pooh in the machine. But it got worse. The bloody thing had bitten into one of the plastic containers, which meant it didn’t align in the machine anymore, so the machine didn’t recognize the container and that meant the machine didn’t work, which meant no coffee.

Catastrophe!!

The Steve/Vick Mousetrap Solution...

But it gets better. To top it off, the rat was still in there! It’s made our coffee machine home, and that has started a new mission. See above the picture of our coffee machine with a giant Disney bag attached? That is the genius mousetrap solution Steve and Vick came up with - they’ve sealed the entire machine - and the bag is meant to catch the rat when it comes out hunting for food.

Ummm…

I was a little perplexed with the thinking. Surely if the rat could munch into solid plastic and do some serious damage on the actual machine, a plastic bag wasn’t going to be much of an obstacle? The next morning my thinking proved correct, as a giant hole in the plastic bag was revealed, as well as some munched up bananas.

But the rat didn’t run for the hills - it returned to the coffee machine and it’s still there.

Steve was determined to get the rat out, and he even arranged for the coffee machine repair guys to come and fix the machine in expectation of rat eviction success.

HOWEVER I’m like babe, I don’t give a crap if they can fix everything that needs to be fixed in this machine, a RAT HAS LIVED IN IT FOR A FEW DAYS AND I’M NEVER GOING TO DRINK COFFEE FROM IT AGAIN!! Would you?

Boy he resisted. Our beautiful Jura has served us faithfully for nearly a decade and we have always loved it. But bless him, I believe Steve has an emotional attachment to it because I bought it for him as a gift all those years ago. Thus the idea of replacing it just hurt his heart a little. We replaced it though. We were always going to replace it.

So if you’re planning to visit, you can definitely expect a loving coffee when you wake up, because don’t you worry, the coffee will always be flowing at our place. And you know what, it gets better, this time we got a RED Jura!!  

The bloody rat is still in the old coffee machine though. Vick will not give up until the bugger is dead. I’ve moved on and I don’t care what happens now, as long as it doesn’t move into the new Jura. That would definitely piss me off.

Yours, without the bollocks

Andrea