Over the course of the past couple of months, a series of random, seemingly unrelated events have culminated in the loss, theft, destruction, and return of my AirPods. The culprit? A rat. I know it sounds outlandish, ridiculous even, to the point one is compelled to state, for the record, that everything you are about to read is 100% true. I completely understand if some parts of this story seem fabricated. Still, I would hope that the reader would give my imagination credit enough to create a fantasy more tantalizing and exciting than this stranger-than-fiction tale. 

The story begins…

On November 1, 2023, I was spray painting a bicycle wheel inside the garage. The air was so full of paint that you could see a faint cloud hanging over the workbench. I had no intention of spending any time out there once I was finished applying the paint, so I was not concerned about breathing in the fumes. When I was done, I cracked the garage door a few inches to let in some fresh air after I left. That was when my problem began. 

I completely forgot about the garage door until about midnight that night. I was already in bed and didn’t want to get up to close the door, but I knew if I didn’t, the thought of the door being open would keep me up all night. It wasn’t open far enough for any human to get in, but it was open enough for vermin to get in, and since we have strange cats loitering in our yard and a family of raccoons living in the Cyprus trees along the side of the garage, I thought it best not to tempt fate. So, I went out and shut the door. Fate, I would soon find out, doesn’t go to bed as early as I do.  

The next day, I went out to the garage, and when I turned on the light, I saw a little brown rat run under the workbench. I chased after it, but it was gone. I knew exactly where it went, though. Behind my toolbox is a hole in the wall where we store all of our Christmas decorations. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. It’s really the vacant space underneath the stairs that opens into the garage. It’s always been the preferred spot for vermin when they decide to take up residence in our garage because it’s the one spot out there that is left undisturbed for most of the year. 

I hated the idea of taking all the decorations out, putting them all back, and then pulling them all out again in just a few weeks when Bonnie was ready to decorate for Christmas, especially with no guarantee that I would be able to find or catch the rat, but I had no choice. I couldn’t just leave the rat to its own devices. So, I started pulling boxes out of the hole. When I got down to the tree and one wreath, I wondered if she was actually in there. Had I just wasted a bunch of time looking for a rat that wasn’t there? But just as I had this thought, I heard her moving inside the wreath bag. I slowly picked it up, and when she felt it move, she poked her little head out of a hole in the bag and then bolted. 

She ran across the garage, but it was such a mess from all the different projects I had going on that I had no hope of tracking her. I was in the middle of building seven picture frames for Christmas presents, so the garage was covered in sawdust, wood scraps, tools, and glass, and that was all just from one project. I also had several other projects in various stages of completion strewn about the space as well. I looked around but couldn’t find any sign of her, so I gave up, put the decorations back, and waited for her to show her ugly face again. Strangely, though, she didn’t. 

Fast Forward to December 6.

I didn’t see any sign of her again for about five weeks. I went out to the garage to record a video response to a comment some pedantic twat left on my pool table video, and I happened to notice rat shit all over the pool table. Great, I thought, she was still here. I had hoped that I had scared her off, but the evidence showed that she was not only not scared, but she was getting quite comfortable. I was going to have to deal with her, but there wasn’t time just then to tear the garage apart. 

I sat down and started recording my video. Suddenly, my AirPod case fell out of my pocket. I looked down to see what had fallen, saw it was my AirPod case, picked it up, and put it back in my pocket. I didn’t think anything of it. 

December 7, 2023

The next day, however, when I needed to use my AirPods, I discovered they were missing from their case. Where could they be? I’m not one of those people who leaves loose AirPods lying around. They are either in my ears or in their case at all times. I’m so diligent about it, in fact, that when I texted my boys to see if they knew where my AirPods were, my oldest said he hadn’t seen them other than in my ears. 

The only possible explanation was that someone took them out of the case. Eew, I thought. Who would do that? I’m all for a secondhand market, but there are just some things that I would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, acquire used, regardless of the price, and earbuds are at the top of that list.

I started to panic a bit, thinking that we had been robbed. I looked around to see if anything else was missing, but nothing was. Besides, if someone had stolen my AirPods, why would they leave the case? 

I called Bonnie and asked if she had seen them, and she launched into the standard “help someone find a missing object” series of questions. When was the last time you used them? Where did you have them last? Do they show up on Find My? Blah, Blah, Blah. 

I had used them the day before on a long phone call with my mom. I was in the garage when we hung up, and I know I took them out of my ears, put them back in their case, and then put the case back in my pocket. That they’re not there means someone had to have taken them. There’s no other explanation. But who and why? 

Then Bonnie said something interesting. She asked me if I had recently dropped my AirPod case. I told her that it had fallen out of my pocket in the garage just the day before. She said, “They’re in the garage. I drop my AirPod case all the time, and when it hits the ground, the AirPods go flying in different directions.” I had already scoured the garage, though. Since it was the last place I had seen my AirPods, it was the first place I looked for them. I crawled around with a flashlight on my hands and knees and checked every inch of the garage, but they just weren’t out there. Just to be sure, though, I went out and I looked again, and again I found nothing.

An Absolutely Ludacris Hypothesis

It got me thinking, though. What if she’s right? What if they did fly out of the case, and I didn’t notice? Then, sometime in the eighteen hours between dropping my AirPod case and discovering that my AirPods were missing, the rat found my AirPods and dragged them off to her nest. It was a ludicrous thought. We’re talking about a rat, not a ferret. It was crazy. It was such a ridiculous idea that I was embarrassed to run my hypothesis by Bonnie later that evening. We were driving home after she picked me up from getting my haircut, and I started to tell her what I thought might have happened. As I did, though, it just sounded so ridiculous. I tried again, stopped, and finally, I just came out with it. She thought it was just as ridiculous as I did. Or maybe she just thought that I was ridiculous. Either way, she would know the truth soon enough.

So, it was down to two scenarios. Either some disgusting, ear fetish pervert – yes, kink shame – stole my AirPods but left the case behind, or a rat found my AirPods on the garage floor and ran off with them. At this point, I decided to never speak of this to anyone and die wondering what happened to my AirPods.

December 8, 2023

But then, the next day, I was getting my bike out of the garage, and since the door was up, I thought I would look around to see if I could see my AirPods from a new angle. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My left AirPod was lying beneath the bandsaw at the front of the garage. 

Had it been there the whole time? For a moment, I thought it was plausible that it had flown out of the case when the case hit the floor and slid 15’ across the garage before finally coming to rest under the bandsaw. It didn’t seem likely, but it was the only reasonable explanation I had. It was also reasonable to think that I had just overlooked it during my multiple sweeps of the garage floor. These “reasonable” thoughts were immediately replaced by the horrible realization that the unthinkable had come true when I noticed that the AirPod was missing the rubber earpiece. Then I noticed that the little plastic bit formerly attached to the rubber earpiece was lying on the ground next to it. My brain, however, wasn’t up to making the obvious connection that the rubber earpiece had been separated from the plastic bit and that that wasn’t possible from being dropped and sliding across the floor. I stood there confused, staring at my AirPod in my hand. As I examined it closer, though, I saw that the pod itself had been gnawed on. Suddenly, my brain came around and started to accept the reality before me. The little bitch really did steal my AirPods. I looked around for the right one but didn’t see it anywhere. It would turn up when I found her nest and destroyed her, I thought to myself.

Time To Take Action

I immediately set a trap under the workbench, baited it with peanut butter, and then set up a camera and waited. I waited all day. I checked on the trap periodically, but there were no signs that she was still in the garage until about 8 p.m. when my son came inside to tell me that the rat was on the pool table. My dad had given me his old TV a few weeks earlier. I have no immediate use for it, so it has been sitting, wrapped in bubble wrap, in the same spot I left it when I took it out of his car weeks earlier. The rat was in the bubble wrap.

I grabbed my pellet gun and went out to see. I could hear her crawling around on the bubble wrap. I imagine it’s extraordinarily frustrating to be so close to bubble wrap but too small and weak to pop it. I slowly lifted the TV. My plan was to shoot her through the bubble wrap, but she was too quick. She darted out of the bubble wrap, almost too fast for me to see, ran across the pool table, down to the floor, and under the washing machine. Our washer and dryer is a single stacked unit. It’s very heavy and very inconvenient to move, not that there was any point in moving it. She would have bolted as soon as I started moving it anyway. I climbed up on top of the dryer to try to see the narrow space behind it. I couldn’t see much, but I fired a shot down to the floor anyway, just in case I got lucky.

 At about 10:45 p.m., Bonnie asked me if I had checked the camera recently. I hadn’t, so I opened the app to have a look. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the peanut butter was gone. I went out to investigate. The peanut butter was gone. The trap wasn’t sprung, but the peanut butter had been licked clean. 

I went back and looked through the footage to see when she ate the peanut butter. I couldn’t believe what I saw. She had eaten the peanut butter just minutes earlier. She was playing with me. She didn’t steal the peanut butter and then rush off. No, she took her time, left, came back, ate some more, left again, and came back to get another taste. She was taunting me. She came back the last time while I was looking through the footage. This time, she wasn’t so lucky. She sprung the trap. I heard the racket through the camera. I switched over to the live feed, but the trap was no longer in frame. I ran out to the garage to investigate and found the trap upside down about three feet from where I had set it. She was still alive. 

I wasn’t sure what to do with her. I’ve never had to finish the job with a snap trap before. Once, many years ago, Bonnie bought a bunch of glue traps against my protesting. I told her that glue traps don’t kill the rat; they just immobilize it and leave you me to dispatch it. She bought and placed them anyway. Later that night, she stood in the garage yelling for me to kill the rat stuck to the trap while our son’s pet rat sat perched on her shoulder. She’s never been able to properly explain her simultaneous love for pet rats and disdain for wild ones. It’s not a huge mystery, though. Her house was overrun with rats when she was growing up. She used to lay in bed at night and listen to the rats running all over the house, so to this day, she has no tolerance for the tiny sounds of scurrying in the walls. Who can blame her? 

One night, when we were staying at our cabin in Arizona, a rat was scurrying around above the insulation in the rafters. The cabin is more of an unfinished shanty. The ceiling in the bedroom is just styrofoam insulation shoved between the rafters. Bonnie was freaking out. It was 2:30 a.m., and I was beyond tired. She wasn’t going to let us sleep until this rat was dead, so I got out of bed, grabbed my BB gun and a flashlight, and pointed it at the piece of insulation from which I heard the rat scratching or gnawing. I took my time and homed in on the sound. I carefully aimed with my ears, and when I was sure I had the rat in my sight, I pulled the trigger. I paused to hear where it ran to, but there was no sound. A few seconds later, a drop of blood ran out of the hole made by the BB. I crawled back into bed and slept in peace.

I could have put the rat in the trap down in the same way, but I didn’t want to. I always feel bad afterward. I’m glad that I didn’t because my decision not to kill the rat made the ending of this story so much more interesting.

I went back inside to look at the video of the moment the trap snapped. Seeing the footage, I fully understood why the trap didn’t kill the rat. When the trap sprung, it launched into the air. So much energy was lost to the force of launching the trap that there wasn’t enough left to break the rat’s neck.

I went back out to the garage about thirty minutes later, and she was gone. Not gone as in dead, but gone as in she somehow liberated herself from the icy steel jaw of death. She was nowhere to be seen, loose again somewhere in the garage. 

How Could She Escape?

The trap had snapped on her neck. If it didn’t kill her, surely it must have paralyzed her to some extent. A few years ago, I was riding my bike along the bike path here in town, and I came across a baby squirrel that had been caught in a rat trap. I don’t know how long it had been stuck in the trap, but it wasn’t dead. I pried the metal bar off of its neck, and it staggered away, seemingly unable to fully use the right side of its body. I can’t be sure if the damage was permanent because I never saw the squirrel again.

I imagined the rat running around the garage in circles, unable to use one side of its body or the other. I’ll never know, though, because there was no sign of her.

The Prodigal Pod Returns

I expected one of two things to happen. Either the garage was going to start to stink, or I was going to have to catch her again. To my shock, however, neither of those things happened. Four Days later, Bonnie ran in from the garage to tell me that my right AirPod was on the pool table. She wasn’t sure if it was the same AirPod that I found under the bandsaw or the other one. I picked it up, examined it, and then brought it over to the table where I left the other. I had them both. They were both missing the rubber earpiece, the little plastic bit was lying nearby, and they both had been gnawed on. If there was any doubt about the fate of my AirPods before, it was dispelled for sure now.

But What Did It Mean?

Was this a peace offering? Was she sending me a message? Did she want me to know that she was still alive and that this wasn’t over? Was she declaring war? Obviously, this was no ordinary rat I was dealing with. This was that Moushunt mouse. 

I knew what I had to do. I had to catch her again before I ended up tied up in a trunk in the attic. I rebaited the trap, but this time, I nailed it to a large piece of wood so no energy would escape by tossing the trap through the air. I learned many, many years ago from catching rats at my mom’s house that snap traps work better when they are fixed to something. I used to nail them to the rafters in the attic. One summer, when I was about 20, I nailed one to the rafter just inside the attic entrance. Every morning, I would climb up, empty the trap, rebait it, and wait for the next one. It was better than poison. A few years earlier, my brother set out poison for the rats, and one of them ate it and then died in the walls. The house stunk for a week and then filled up with flies like The Amityville Horror. My goal ever since has been to avoid anything like that ever again; that’s why I stick to snap traps.

I placed the trap in the hole, and I waited. And I waited, and I waited. The trap sat there undisturbed for weeks. The glob of peanut butter actually started to collect dust. No new rat shit appeared anywhere. She was gone. 

She wasn’t sending me a message after all, at least not a malicious one. I sent her a message. When I caught her in that trap, she knew I wasn’t playing. She knew her days were numbered if she stayed in my garage, so she split, but not before leaving my right AirPod on the pool table as an apology and maybe a peace offering.

And with that, the case of the mysteriously missing AirPods was solved. Hopefully, word will spread through the vermin community that my garage is not a place to build your nest. Or the next one who tries might not be so lucky.

You can watch a video about this ridiculous tale down below.