..and I don't sit up nights feeling guilty about stuck mouse suffering.....because my goal is to KILL the mice. Not fake the mice out into thinking they've stumbled into Mice Nirvana. No, I am KILLING the mice.

The end of a life is never pretty. It can be quicker or slower, depending on the method. I think we can all agree that quicker might be preferable - not just for the mouse but for US. Mostly for us.

In college I learned the wooden traps were not always quicker - after clubbing to death the 4th mouse that didn't die from a cleanly broken neck, I started using sticky traps.

I had mice for a year. I live in a 3 unit condo. Here's what worked:

1. Sticky traps sticky traps sticky traps. Lay them any pathway you see poop. Behind and under the stove and fridge, behind counter top appliances.

2. all open food goes into tupperware. no exceptions. this includes dog food. also, don't leave the butter out - absent anything else to eat, you'll find tiny tracks in the butter.

3. dog food and cat food - don't let it stay out all day and night. put it in tupperware when they aren't eating.

4. if your neighbors have dogs or cats, ensure they keep the food in tupperware containers and don't leave dishes of food out all day and night. buy them the tupperware yourself if you have to.

5. if you keep big new bags of dog and cat food around, it's best to transfer to plastic bins asap so mice won't chew through the bags..always keep this stuff in garage, basement, or protected porch.

if you don't do #3 and #4 you will never get rid of the mice. you have to eliminate their food source.

when you haven't seen any mouse activity for a couple of weeks, leave a bowl of dog food out in the center of a room (best if basement or garage) all night long. surround it with glue traps. do this for a week. you'll catch the empty nesters (mice are adaptive - they send the little ones to test the waters/poison/traps first, leaving the adults as last to survive and breed again)

If you didn't get the last of them, the good news is that any survivors are now expecting food to be in these areas, not your house, and will look there first. Put occasional fresh dog food or cat food in this area until you get the last of them. change the location of the bowl, but always surround with traps.

The LW's knowleddge and moral judgements notwithstanding, the office mate may be quite good at what he was hired to do.

While it's something of a Dr. Phil-ism that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, I think it's pretty human to object to this little trope when applied to ourselves. Especially if we've sought some sort of professional/therapeutic help for our problems and issues. I have been in therapy for 3 years now. Before that I scoffed at therapy. I had it all figured out. I was pretty morally bankrupt but that's not a bad place to be when you're totally fine with it, or oblivious to it. It only causes other people problems. That is...until the day the compartments start leaking. Which happened to me, and, it seems, happened to the office mate too. It matters not a bit that external events led me to therapy (read: got caught). Like Paul on the road to Damascus, the event precipitated the scales falling (slowly) from my eyes. I changed. More importantly, I wanted to change and still do - the changes I *still* need to make, or haven't quite accomplished yet, seem not to matter quite as much as this fact.

It's not up to the LW to out the office mate for past sins or her presumption of his character defects. Her knowledge of the man is knowledge of a man in the past, not necessarily the present man. As Cary says - if he hasn't changed, he'll give her ample ammunition to use in the present and future to have him removed - from proximity if not premises. Until then, she should maybe think about what it means to detest someone for knowing them fully. We are all (or most of us, anyway) better than our worst acts. Suppose office mate got wind of less-than-savory info out LW? And felt compelled to share it around in the hopes of getting everyone to subscribe to his moral universe, which has no room for the likes of her?

It seems that if the LW has once held a therapeutic role, she would be a bit more sanguine about how the therapy has the potential to change the patient..and would give him a fighting chance to prove he has made at least the nominal changes she deems necessary to make him detestable no more. Was her therapeutic skill so useless, so ineffective? Is she so judgemental as to believe that where she may have failed, all others necessarily have to? She has no room for the notion that perhaps - just perhaps - we don't all, always, operate on the worst impulses that drove past actions?

Until she knows differently, the LW should presume that the office mate was hired under the same aegis as she, herself - the management team found the best person with the right skills for the job at hand. A person's detestability doesn't always go hand in hand with their ability to do the job they were hired to do (and deriding the smooth talking talent of the office mate just comes off as jealousy).