From: caz@owlnet.rice.edu (HWRNMNBSOL)
Subject: Today's Strangeness
Organization: Rice University
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 21:39:53 GMT

Most people can, given the motivation, find one slightly odd thing that 
occurred to them on any given day.  Somewhat more rare is the genuinely
bizarre happening, which comes about every few months and can be spotted
by those who are attuned to the correct mental wavelength.  Beyond that is
the regime of the well and truly STRANGE -- events that, much like the
passing of particularly bright comet, occur only once in a great while,
and tend to be harbingers of doom and destruction.  

Once of these happened to me today.  Let me tell you about it.

Only last night I had been rereading all my old horror novels in search of
inspiration for a separate project I am currently involved in on another
newsgroup.  One of the books I read was called _Graveyard Shift_; it is an
anthology of Stephen King short stories.  One of the stories was about two
exterminators who are cleaning the rats out of an office building and find
a tunnel leading down.  They enter the tunnel with the fire hose which they
use to crush the rodents and track the evil vermin to their source.  On the
way, the rats grow steadily larger, fiercer, and more mutated.  At the end,
the men find that the ruins of a certain village of ill repute is buried
under the city, and the evil from that place has mutated the rats into vile
servants of darkness.  The narrator escapes as his companion is devoured by
the chief rat, a beastie the size of a pony.

It was a well-written story.  It gave me the chills.

Cut to Real Life: My job, in part, entails the surveying of office buildings
to determine where fire sprinklers can be placed.  Today my supervisor and I
were taking a look at the Bank One building in downtown Houston.  We were in
the basement, and we had to look at some fairly messy and deserted rooms.
One of the tools of my trade is called a storypole -- a telescoping plastic
rod which is used to determine ceiling heights and the like.  We had one of
these with us, as well as assorted plans, hardhats, tape measures, and so on.

As we pushed our way past stacks of crumbling cardboard boxes to get at a
particularly distant door, I started laughing.  My boss wanted to know what
I was on about, and I told him about the story I had read last night.  We 
both had a pretty good laugh.  From that point onward, we were constantly
shouting, "AHH! RATS!" at each other and generally being morons.  Lots of
fun, my job.

We got to the door at last and cracked it open.  It was partially blocked,
however, so we had to go in one at a time.  My boss went first and started
hunting for the light switch.  As is usually the case in this kind of story,
nobody had remembered to bring a flashlight.  

As my supervisor was groping around, he actually screamed.  At first I thought
he was just kidding around, but he had shouted so shrilly and loudly that I
dashed in to see what was going on.  Inside the room, it was too dark to see
anything but a few feet in.  My boss was still shouting like hell and 
blundering around somewhere in the center of the room.  I looked to my left
and saw the light switch about a yard away and through some shelves.  I
reached in with the storypole and turned the light on.  Bossman was crouched
on the floor holding his wrist.

And attached to his wrist was the BIGGEST FUCKING RAT you ever saw.

To make a long story slightly less long..... I have named my storypole
'Verminslayer'.  Long may it ward the earnest yeomen of Grinnell Corporation
from the nefarious plans of rodentkind.

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                         HWRNMNBSOL 
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre