When All Else Fails, Write About Rat Sex
My name is Danielle Hubbard and I earn my living as a minion of the Institute for Mind and Biology. During frigid Chicago mornings, you may find me scurrying around in tiny rooms lit only with dark-red light bulbs, rooms which can only be accessed with a special black key, a key which unlocks great big metal double-doors that slam behind you and echo down the hall. Yes: If you don a lab coat and latex gloves and enter these dark-red rooms, you may find me, hidden among rows and rows of plastic bins, in which black-and-white rats live lives of leisure, eating, drinking, sleeping, and, of course, having lots and lots of rat sex. This is where I come in.
My job consists of the following: filling pipettes with saline and sticking them inside female rats (I just can't bring myself to use the v-word when referring to rats. Or humans, for that matter) to get a cell sample, and then looking at said sample under a microscope. This is called "smearing." If they have a lot of little round cells with black dots in the middle (as opposed to big gray splotches or tiny pinprick-like specks) then that means they're ready and willing. If this is the case, a variety of scenarios may ensue: I may stick a male in the female's cage and watch to make sure they go at it, or I may do nothing, or I may film some rat bondage porn, depending on the season (i.e., the orders I receive from my humorless boss). Yesterday, for example, I was instructed to smear a couple of rats who had just mated, and "see if there was sperm in the slides." Now, I've been smearing rats for over a year now, but sperm? Rat sperm? I'm sorry, but EWWWWWWW!!! (For the record, rat sperm looks like a short, skinny grey line. Also, they don't move, at least as far as I could tell by looking at the slide. I guess I was expecting them be squiggling around like little tadpoles. Isn't that what sperm is supposed to do?)
Lately I've been doing a lot of breeding with older rats. Because they are older, their smears may be unreliable. In other words, they may be ready and willing when no small circles with black dots are apparent. So, I just load about seven cages onto a cart and wheel them into a center room, and then line them all up on the counter. Then I get a male and put him in the first cage. If they don't mate, I put him in the second cage. If they don't mate, I put him in the third cage. And so on. Exciting, huh?
Actually, there is one thing about doing this that excites me (not that kind of excitement, you sick fuck.). That's when, twenty-two days later, the female has a bunch of little pink rat babies. Looking at them, I get this feeling of pride, like, I created life! (Once I said that--"Aww, I created life!"--to my humorless boss. She ignored me) Unfortunately, most of these little pink rat babies either die or get eaten by their mother. EATEN, AS IN CHEW CHEW CHEW SWALLOW. I'm pretty obsessed with this in a freakshow sort of way and bring it up all the time to my humorless boss, who laughs at me but also gets kind of annoyed. Recently, I was quietly assembling rat cages on the cart while humorless boss and cool boss discussed rat 3101-44-7-10, who was scuttling around her cage with crazed eyes. They had decided to "sac" her because "she ate all her pups" (said humorless boss). They looked at her. "No wonder she's all fat!" said cool boss.
(pause)
Me: "EWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
They looked at me strangely and sort of chuckled as I sheepishly turned away and continued assembling rat cages.
Speaking of sac'ing, as they call it in those parts, it means sticking a sick and/or old and/or crazy rat into a big cooler with a carbon-dioxide funnel in it. I just found out yesterday that "sac'ing" apparently stands for "sacrifice," like, sacrifice to the gods of biopsychology or something. Once I asked my humorless boss if killing so many rats has "hardened" her, partly because I was curious and partly because I'm immature and wanted to see what her reaction would be. She replied that she's always hated the rats anyway. She doesn't like small animals at all--and she's been studying rats almost daily for six years! No wonder she's so fucking humorless!
One final happy thought: On Monday, I was weighing the pups when I saw that one had died. My boss had told me that if I found a dead pup, I was to put it in a little baggie and then take it to the freezer in the surgery suite (don't even get me STARTED on the gigantor apparatus they have in the surgery suite, whose sole purpose is ostensibly to dissect or operate on rodents.). So, with some trepidation, I dropped the little dead pup in a plastic bag (after checking twice to make sure it was actually dead, since I was terrified of accidentally suffocating it), carried it down the hall, opened the freezer door, and was greeted with the pleasant sight of hundreds of perfectly preserved rat corpses, each in a little baggie, piled on top of each other.
And don't even get me started on the pickled rat tumors...
My name is Danielle Hubbard and I earn my living as a minion of the Institute for Mind and Biology. During frigid Chicago mornings, you may find me scurrying around in tiny rooms lit only with dark-red light bulbs, rooms which can only be accessed with a special black key, a key which unlocks great big metal double-doors that slam behind you and echo down the hall. Yes: If you don a lab coat and latex gloves and enter these dark-red rooms, you may find me, hidden among rows and rows of plastic bins, in which black-and-white rats live lives of leisure, eating, drinking, sleeping, and, of course, having lots and lots of rat sex. This is where I come in.
My job consists of the following: filling pipettes with saline and sticking them inside female rats (I just can't bring myself to use the v-word when referring to rats. Or humans, for that matter) to get a cell sample, and then looking at said sample under a microscope. This is called "smearing." If they have a lot of little round cells with black dots in the middle (as opposed to big gray splotches or tiny pinprick-like specks) then that means they're ready and willing. If this is the case, a variety of scenarios may ensue: I may stick a male in the female's cage and watch to make sure they go at it, or I may do nothing, or I may film some rat bondage porn, depending on the season (i.e., the orders I receive from my humorless boss). Yesterday, for example, I was instructed to smear a couple of rats who had just mated, and "see if there was sperm in the slides." Now, I've been smearing rats for over a year now, but sperm? Rat sperm? I'm sorry, but EWWWWWWW!!! (For the record, rat sperm looks like a short, skinny grey line. Also, they don't move, at least as far as I could tell by looking at the slide. I guess I was expecting them be squiggling around like little tadpoles. Isn't that what sperm is supposed to do?)
Lately I've been doing a lot of breeding with older rats. Because they are older, their smears may be unreliable. In other words, they may be ready and willing when no small circles with black dots are apparent. So, I just load about seven cages onto a cart and wheel them into a center room, and then line them all up on the counter. Then I get a male and put him in the first cage. If they don't mate, I put him in the second cage. If they don't mate, I put him in the third cage. And so on. Exciting, huh?
Actually, there is one thing about doing this that excites me (not that kind of excitement, you sick fuck.). That's when, twenty-two days later, the female has a bunch of little pink rat babies. Looking at them, I get this feeling of pride, like, I created life! (Once I said that--"Aww, I created life!"--to my humorless boss. She ignored me) Unfortunately, most of these little pink rat babies either die or get eaten by their mother. EATEN, AS IN CHEW CHEW CHEW SWALLOW. I'm pretty obsessed with this in a freakshow sort of way and bring it up all the time to my humorless boss, who laughs at me but also gets kind of annoyed. Recently, I was quietly assembling rat cages on the cart while humorless boss and cool boss discussed rat 3101-44-7-10, who was scuttling around her cage with crazed eyes. They had decided to "sac" her because "she ate all her pups" (said humorless boss). They looked at her. "No wonder she's all fat!" said cool boss.
(pause)
Me: "EWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
They looked at me strangely and sort of chuckled as I sheepishly turned away and continued assembling rat cages.
Speaking of sac'ing, as they call it in those parts, it means sticking a sick and/or old and/or crazy rat into a big cooler with a carbon-dioxide funnel in it. I just found out yesterday that "sac'ing" apparently stands for "sacrifice," like, sacrifice to the gods of biopsychology or something. Once I asked my humorless boss if killing so many rats has "hardened" her, partly because I was curious and partly because I'm immature and wanted to see what her reaction would be. She replied that she's always hated the rats anyway. She doesn't like small animals at all--and she's been studying rats almost daily for six years! No wonder she's so fucking humorless!
One final happy thought: On Monday, I was weighing the pups when I saw that one had died. My boss had told me that if I found a dead pup, I was to put it in a little baggie and then take it to the freezer in the surgery suite (don't even get me STARTED on the gigantor apparatus they have in the surgery suite, whose sole purpose is ostensibly to dissect or operate on rodents.). So, with some trepidation, I dropped the little dead pup in a plastic bag (after checking twice to make sure it was actually dead, since I was terrified of accidentally suffocating it), carried it down the hall, opened the freezer door, and was greeted with the pleasant sight of hundreds of perfectly preserved rat corpses, each in a little baggie, piled on top of each other.
And don't even get me started on the pickled rat tumors...
